HealthTech and AgTech Panel - 361Firm NY Tech Summit Feb. 25 2025

  Health, Ag and Ed Tech Panel -...ech Summit (Feb. 25, 2025) (1) Sat, Mar 01, 2025 10:54PM • 19:43 SUMMARY KEYWORDS Healthcare innovation, AI solutions, value-based care, healthcare institutions, national emergency, AI convenience, agriculture technology, carbon credits, nutritional content, small-scale farming, food security, vertical farming, healthcare incentives, virtual drug trials, surgical bots. SPEAKERS Rich Sobel, Speaker 5, Mark Sanor, Speaker 3, Robin Blackstone, Rashmi Joshi, Alex Zhuk, Kris Wood   Mark Sanor  00:00 Roshni, Chris, come up quickly, introductions and insights, and then we go to what scares it excites you. Thank you guys. So why don't you start? Actually, Chris hasn't spoken yet. Surprisingly.   Kris Wood  00:20 Okay, Hi, I'm Chris Wood. Very quickly, I am with a company called Three BP partners. We are investors, technologists and operators that effectively now in health care, rather than sell products and services, rather than sell solutions, we're selling what we think the health care system really needs, which are outcomes and cash so we can you're selling cash. We're selling cash. Okay, we're selling cash. How you doing that? We are we are basically partnering with the health care institutions, taking risks with them, operating the business, businesses we're creating with them and sharing the financial and outcome rewards with them. So we're not a traditional vendor saying, Let us sell you something. It's let us invest in something. You give us your data, you give us your brand, you give us your distribution. We will create products that are incremental to you, to bridge you to value based care and outcome based care. What scares me is, look, I don't need to go into how messed up our health care system is, right? We all know that this country is investing twice as much as anyone else per person in health care, and we're getting the least value for our money. That that is also trend or coming down to our health care institutions. McKinsey has published reports saying our health care institutions are two to 300 basis points under water in terms of the difference between what returns they're getting from payers, the growth in that versus the growth in inflation and and they're $500 million behind in the last three years in terms of the discrepancy in payments, right? So their margins are single digits. They're getting lower. Our health care systems are in trouble. And, you know, we're still fatter and less healthy than everyone else. I think this is a national emergency. I think we can wind up, or we don't, certainly don't want to end up as a nation of wall es, right? If you remember the movie where, you know, we're just a bunch of puffy, non thinking individuals who, you know we're living on machines, basically because we can't take care of ourselves. I think this is a national emergency. What excites me is that always within massive problems becomes massive opportunities, right? The technology is here. AI is here. Solutions exist. Solutions themselves are not the answer. They're part of the solution. Technology is not the answer, they're part of the solution. But how the entire business model of health care really needs to be rethought. The incentives need to be rethought. But if you can help figure that out, I think that's a massive opportunity. Who wants to go? I think she should. Ladies. Ladies second,   Rashmi Joshi  03:16 thank you. First of all, Mark, nice to be here with all of you. My name is rash me, Joshi. I'm the founder and CEO of Asha AI, and I'm a serial entrepreneur. So I've been building businesses since I was 16 years old, working currently on company five. My third is founder, CEO. Been very fortunate to have had a couple of exits along the way, and I also advise a small number of family offices and funds on specifically health care, AI and impact investments, which I personally believe should be every investment that we make, especially in this room.   Mark Sanor  03:49 What was the 16 year old business when you were 16? It   Rashmi Joshi  03:52 was a dance company. So I grew up singing, dancing, acting and modeling. So I performed all over the place, and had a great time doing it. What scares me most is that a lot of the innovation that's happening now, thanks to AI, is all based on making our lives more comfortable and more convenient, and there hasn't been a tremendous, tremendous amount of thought going into figuring out what happens when we make our lives too convenient. What do we actually do when we're not forced to innovate? And that scares me, because it could mean the breakdown of our innovation fabric as a society. I think most of us as innovators on this panel too. We build things out of necessity, and so when we don't have that neces necessity driving us to ask questions, then how do we actually create new innovations that are leaps and bounds ahead of the way that we live now? And what inspires us? Because very easily we could say, you know, most people who are. Are retired, experience a huge decline in terms of their health, in terms of their well being, in terms of their mental health, they're less likely to reach out to their communities and connect with people. So we could go in that direction if we're not careful about how we decide to respond to this influx of AI tech, but we could also go in the opposite direction and say, Hey, we're going to take this as an opportunity to focus our energies, our efforts, our time, on building something that's truly leaps and bounds forward. So that scares me, but I'm also optimistic, as we probably all are in this room, and I hope that it inspires more of us to build more community, to have more conversations like this, and to start building more innovative solutions to bigger problems than the ones we're experiencing now.   Mark Sanor  05:56 So I guess you've already answered that question, Alex in a different way, or unless you have any additional thoughts. I mean, do   Alex Zhuk  06:03 you want me to give instruction of the company and how it relates to agriculture? Yeah, sure, yeah. I mean, very quickly. Once again, Alex, great to be here, founder of a company that use satellites and AI models to map the footprint that farmers are having on the environment. Fundamentally, it has two purposes. One is to measure the agriculture sector's contribution to climate change and how we can solve it. But two and where we see the world heading is actually being able to measure the carbon the farmers are sequestering by adopting climate positive practices in the form of carbon credits, and that is important, especially when you zoom out and consider all farmers.   Mark Sanor  06:49 So in doing this, what surprised you the most in your journey? Sure,   Speaker 3  06:54 agriculture specifically, but I imagine there are other sectors, and   Mark Sanor  06:59 by the way, you raise like $18 million yeah, so Bloomberg and   Alex Zhuk  07:04 Bloomberg Microsoft, and then the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore for various teach reasons, and the world operation on multiple continents. What surprised me about agriculture is one the tradition inherent in the industry. You know, these farmers have been doing things their own way for generations. It's family business. You know, you need to come in humble and not just, you know, be with typical Silicon Valley, you know, shaker and disrupt her, because this is, you know, not just their livelihood, but their land and their legacy. And that has consequences, both in terms of how you work with the farmer community, but also fundamentally speed of scale, you can just come in and expect to grow like a hockey stick, because cycles are quite literally annual. You plant, you try, you come back in Europe, you reassess. So I would say not to bore anybody else more, I would say the biggest surprise was the Jux disposition between the Silicon Valley philosophy of building a start up and the reality of how the agriculture sector operates.   Mark Sanor  08:14 Makes sense. So anyone else have any questions in the health, AG, education sectors for our panel, can   Robin Blackstone  08:30 you use your tech? Thanks. Hi, Rob and Blackstone. Can you use your technology to determine nutritional value in the foods that you're evaluating? Because, you know, right now, there's a big discussion around Ultra process, foods and and the actual value, to your point that we're getting out of it, if you could somehow pair that, that might be actually extremely valuable to people. So   Alex Zhuk  08:52 you mentioned that because we actually started out doing that. So the you know, when you look at satellites all around us, the data can be used for whatever purpose you want, because ultimately, we're doing is we're understanding the chemical composition of the soil and the plants that cover it. So we originally started out by with the idea of understanding the nutritional complexity the soil and the plants, and then using that to understand where exactly do you want to spare your nitrogen, or exactly do you want to apply your other fertilizer? The challenge came in terms in terms of commercialization, when, because we weren't bringing new money to farmers, whereas of carbon credits, you're laying a new income stream on top of what they're already getting, which is yield. And unfortunately, the system today pays farmers only for the yield, nothing into account the health aspect of the food or the soil, and they operate on very similar margins, so they're very risk averse to try and compute new things. But to answer your question In short, you know, as we see the trends in terms. Us becoming much more interested in what goes into our bodies. Yes, technology can support us being able to provide more nutritionally Whole Foods. I actually   Speaker 5  10:09 have a question about that as well. You always have the hard questions.   Rashmi Joshi  10:15 So I actually agree with you that we're living in one of the biggest genocides of our time right now, and we don't really even know it. Most of us in this room are consuming on a daily basis 1000s of ingredients that are illegal in most European countries, and there's no way to avoid them. So to follow up on what you just said is it, are you actually able to determine the nutritional content of the actual produce that's being grown, not the soil, but the produce. And the question to follow up on that is, when you have companies like Monsanto that have IP on specific seeds, and you have neighboring farms that are not using those seeds, but as we all know, seeds disperse naturally. So if you are a farmer that's not using that specific type of crop and Monsanto seeds gets into your lot, they can actually sue you for using their products without explicitly paying for them, which is how they've squashed millions of small scale farmers to date. So what are you doing to protect small scale farming, and are you actually able to detect nutritional content of produce? I Alex Zhuk  11:22 produce. Great questions. Great questions. I'll start with the first one, which is, can we quantify and measure the nutritional content produce? We measure the application and the growth of the plants, so not just oil, but also the leaf canopy, but a lot of the nutritional content actually is downstream. How you process it? What do you mix it with, etc, etc. So we can help with that, but we're not going to be the entire answer in terms of helping small hoard farmers, this is something that I'm particularly passionate about, but it is a harder technical challenge, and what I mean by that is, using satellites. One of the magical things about it is that if you can measure carbon in a big farm in Iowa or Australia, you can measure carbon on a farm in Ethiopia, for example. And given that a lot of the countries in the Global South as we term it, have skipped over the land lines and are all digitized with cell phones. There's a digital path to where you can measure the amount of footprint of somebody's small quarter farm and then pay them for that impact, if the proper system is to centralize that. Do we see that a skill today? No, but my hope is that we're going to get there soon, around the winter.   Rich Sobel  12:43 Okay, I have a question. So we're looking at this today, and maybe just over the hill, maybe looking back a little bit. But you know, there's so much technology that's going on, and there's so many problems in food security, we're familiar Eddie and I with vertical farming and indoor farming, and now we're going to have a problem with people coming in and being seasonal workers. Just one small example of what might be resolved if you could figure out other models using technology to feed the planet and to do it with less microbes and plastics, if you can do it in a controlled environment. This maybe applies to health tech as well. Where do you think we are in the percentage utilization of technology compared to the technology that's reasonably available? And how long do you think it's going to take before we see that sort of tipping point where these problems are really being solved, not just on the margin, but in a material way.   Kris Wood  13:50 Well, look, I'll speak to at least the health tech side of that, and I think a lot of things you were saying about food and, AG, it's very similar, which is, there's a misalignment right now between incentives and outcomes, right? Whether, whether it's are you incentive for the amount of food you make or for the nutritional quality of the food you make? Are you incented for keeping people healthy or you incented by the amount of procedures that you do on sick people? We all say we want one thing, right, but people are paid by the other, right? And I had a mentor decades ago who used to tell me, lead, lead somebody by their w2 and their hearts and minds follow, right? So, and that's that's fair. So until you align those incentives, it is going to be difficult. I look, I can speak to health, I can't speak to AG, there is a lot of technology there. I think one of the challenges, at least in health care, is you have entrenched institutions who are motivated economic ly by certain. Regulatory frameworks and and they're slow to act. And so getting those things done at scale right now, until you change the business model, is very difficult, right? That's why we said we're trying to change the business model. We're selling outcomes and we're selling cash. We're not we're not trying to just sell you technology, because guess what? Mr. Hospital, you don the money to pay for it anyway, right? So I think you really have to look fundamentally at the incentive structure and the business structure to really make until that change becomes really prevalent. I   Rashmi Joshi  15:34 think it's going to take too fucking long to change our policy. So I've given up on that. And as an innovator, I focus on, what can I change, and how can I actually spearhead innovation in such a fashion that it forces the health care system to change, and we're experiencing that as we speak. So with ASHA, my company not to go on too much and give you guys a pitch, but I built Asha after my grandma went through cancer as a tool that would help elderly folks, those with disabilities, people who are bed ridden or going through cognitive decline, to have a tool that they can just chat with that's going to help them to stay on top of care. And since then, it's evolved into a platform where now different kinds of health care organizations are approaching us, asking to leverage our technology in ways that we had never conceived of. One example of that is the head of clinical innovation at memorial stone Kettering approached me and said, rash me, have you thought about using Asha to help us run virtual drug trials? Because we've been looking for a tool like this for the last 10 to 15 years. We've tried building it ourselves, and it hasn't worked. And imagine if you are, you know, stage four pancreatic cancer. You're sitting at home and you're thinking yourself, well, I've just been through this intense treatment. There's no way I can participate in this amazing research study that I found on the opposite side of the world, in New York, when I'm based in India and afford flying there, in and out and staying there every few weeks, every few months, to report my outcomes. Well now actually, you can do that through Asha without getting off your couch, so having the ability to participate in potentially life saving clinical research from any part of the world, no matter who you are, what kind of state you have in terms of your health, is such a massive leap forward, and it's something that is actually very aligned with incentives across the board, with the clinicians who are responsible for managing your care with the pharma company, who is looking for greater insights on how patients are responding to their medications, and it's also much easier for family care givers and patients. So I think if you're driving any kind of a systemic change, you have to be bullish about it, and you have to find ways to align incentives, rather than waiting for the policy to catch up to you. And I also think that no one's asked this question yet, but I think it's an important and valid one, which is, how is AI going to change health care? I think eventually we'll start seeing care being delivered at home again, we'll start having things like even routine surgeries being done at home, because you'll have surgical bots that could easily come to your home. You have a greater chance of recovery. Because I think it's crazy that we send all sick people into this great little place called a hospital or clinic where you're already immunocompromised and you're spending time with other sick people, your likelihood of getting sick from just going to the hospital is actually much higher, right? Or Mark Sanor  18:49 sometimes you're like my father, you don't even want the care that he needs because he doesn't want to go there exactly, exactly speaking of cared self care. I'm going to make an audible. You may not like sure that we're going to take a break right now. I put the raw I put, I stack this up with lots of panels and didn't put a break in. So I'm going to take some time from this panel and the next one, a little bit. Just get some movement and have continue this discussion and your break and come back at 305, movement is good. All right, take a break. I'm joined our 361 firm community of investors and thought leaders. We have a lot of events created by the community as we collaborate on investments and philanthropic interests. Join us.  You can subscribe to various 361 events and content at https://361firm.com/subs. For reference: Web: www.361firm.com/homeOnboard as Investor: https://361.pub/shortdiagOnboard Deals 361: www.361firm.com/onbOnboard as Banker: www.361firm.com/bankersEvents: www.361firm.com/eventsContent: www.youtube.com/361firmWeekly Digests: www.361firm.com/digest