#CEOsOfSistema — Tushar Vashisht, CEO, HealthifyMe

Next up in our #CEOsOfSistema series, we speak to Tushar Vashisht, CEO and Co-Founder of HealthifyMe!
Tell us a little about yourself
I’m the CEO of HealthifyMe, India’s largest and most loved health app with a community of over 10 million subscribers, to whom we provide access to quality health content, calorie tracking service and coaching by India’s top coaches and our AI nutritionist called Ria.
Prior to establishing HealthifyMe seven years ago with my co-founder Matthew Cherian, I spent some time with the Unique Identification Authority of India (a Government agency in India) as a Project Strategy Manager for the Aadhar Project. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, I began my career as an investment banker on Wall Street and in the Bay Area before moving to Singapore with Deutsche Bank.
I’m also highly passionate about music and spend my free time as a musician.
What motivated you to launch HealthifyMe?
On a personal level, I had gained more than 20kg of weight after moving back to India and saw calorie tracking and coaching as an effective way to lose weight and get fitter. I knew that others in India — especially those who aren’t as privileged — shared the same problem.
When Matt and I were working together on the Aadhar project, we observed just how rampant poverty had driven an alarming rate of malnutrition across India, as getting an accurate calorie count for most Indian foods was pretty much non-existent back then. In 2012, we conducted an experiment on ourselves by living on just Rs. 100 per day to help us understand the struggle of people living below India’s poverty line. During that time, Matt and I built an Excel sheet with nutritional information on Indian food, which we soon found was very scarce.
This motivated us to create a platform that was affordable, therefore more accessible, for people in India to track their calorie intake.
What are some of the challenges you face in your industry?
Motivation to stick with a program is a key challenge for the fitness industry — especially when needing to convince stakeholders at the beginning of your journey.
When we started in 2011, we were operating in a sleepy Delhi farmhouse with the support of a few computer science interns. The tougher part was getting the support of healthcare stakeholders. At first, we regularly faced skepticism from doctors who thought that calorie counting and food tracking were still very novel concepts. We even had to book consultations with diabetologists (even though we didn’t have diabetes) to try to find a way in and get an audience with these stakeholders.
What sets your company apart from your competitors?
We make pursuing healthy living easy, accessible and affordable by allowing our customers to do it their time, via an app and a fraction of the offline costs.
We do this by combining technology and human services to deliver measurable impact for users via our mobile app. On one hand, our platform allows users to get in touch with our network of nutritionists, fitness trainers and yoga instructors.
On the other hand, Ria — the world’s first AI nutritionist that people can use in the palm of their hands — can be engaged while your coaches guide you, helping you ensure that you stay on track with your health regiment. What Ria does is give our users an ultra-smart solution via an all-in-one-platform where they can do anything from reading up on health tips to receiving instant replies from Ria when chatting.
What is unique about your company culture?
Our culture provides ownership, freedom and empowerment to our employees to deliver maximum impact in the shortest time possible.
The culture that we cultivate today has been due in large part to my co-founder and CTO, Sachin, who left a lasting impression soon after he came on board. He instigated a fundamental baseline shift in the maturity levels and quality benchmarks of our technology team. This would go on to eventually define our culture as being “product first” and “engineering first”. This has formed the key components of our company’s mantra which motivates our employees to excel.
*All responses are attributed to Mr. Tushar Vashisht, CEO of HealthifyMe, and have been taken from trusted brand sources and/or from various interview excerpts with Mr. Vashisht.
