Solving Real World Problems Through Technology— Vivek Wadhwa, Stanford Law School: Full
Entrepreneurs are solving the problems of human health
Academic, researcher, writer and serial entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa discusses advances in technology and urges entrepreneurs to focus on healthcare developments that can solve the world’s health problems and make a difference.
Key takeaways from this episode of StartUp Health NOW can be found here.
[00:00] Chime
[00:05] Unity Stoakes: Welcome to StartUp Health Now! The weekly web show that celebrates the Healthcare Transformers and changemakers reimagining healthcare. Today we are at the Wearable Tech and Digital Health Conference here in San Francisco with a very special guest, Vivek Wadha, who is a fellow at Stanford on the faculty of Singularity University and also a serial entrepreneur. Stick around it’s going to be a very exciting show.
[00:31] Music Intro
[01:08] Vivek Wadha: Vivek, it’s wonderful to be with you here today.
[01:10] Vivek: It’s great to be here.
[01:13] Unity: So I thought we’d start by learning about you, your backstory, what you’re most passionate about.
[01:18] Vivek: I’m a tech entrepreneur who became an academic because I had a heart attack. I had to do something different so I joined academia. I started learning about U.S. competitiveness and things like that.
[01:28] Vivek: I was pretty pessimistic about the future until I came to Silicon Valley and joined up with Singularity University and started learning about exponential technologies and advances.
[01:37] Vivek: If you’ll read my writing I consider this to be the most amazing period in human history. We’re gonna solve the grand challenges of humanity. When we’re going to fix the problems that have held mankind back since mankind’s inception. When we can now build the StarTrek features, amazing future, in which we’re not living just to make money. We’re living to uplift mankind. Enlightenment.
[02:00] Vivek: This is the world that we could be headed into.
[02:02] Unity: Why are you optimistic today?
[02:04] Vivek: Because technology has advanced to the point that anyone, anywhere can solve a big problem. We’re not dependent on governments, or big research labs, or the powerful to do it anymore. Anyone can now build a medical device that comes up with a cure for a disease which really helps you prevent the disease or how it helps you cure cancer perhaps.
[02:28] Vivek: Google is now looking at building nanobots. But the fact is you don’t need Google’s doing that. You can have entrepreneurs now building all sorts of new technologies that could solve the problems of health that could make the world a cleaner and energy-efficient.
[02:42]Vivek: We’re building new technologies which will take us into an area of unlimited clean energy. If you start looking at all of the technologies that are possible and the problems that need to be solved you’ll find that it’s now becoming possible to solve these big problems.
[02:57] Unity: Is it mainly because of technology or what role does the entrepreneur or the innovators themselves play?
[03:04] Vivek: The technology is useless without a human being. You need entrepreneurs who understand problems to solve them with technologies.
[03:11] Vivek: I’m optimistic, I’m also critical about Silicon Valley because the majority of what we do here is the same stupid apps. One day it will be a photo sharing another day it will be some some kind of social media.
[03:22] Vivek: We’re basically wasting 80–90% of the money and energy in Silicon Valley by focusing on the wrong problems. This is why I came to this conference because you have entrepreneurs here who are solving the problems of human health which is critical.
[03:36] Vivek: If we don’t have health we don’t have life. Without that nothing matters. So, if you can solve health now you can start solving the problems of energy, and education, and poverty, and basically the needs of human beings, you make the world a better place.
[03:54] Unity: So what would your message be to, you know, there’s all these entrepreneurs, great talent focusing still on networks and photo sharing, and extraordinary technology.
[04:06] Vivek: Get a life my friends, I mean you’re better than this. You should be using your energy to make the world a better place. Yes, you have a one billion chance that you might strike it rich if you build that stupid photo sharing app, but it’s really a billion in one- maybe one in a million chance.
[04:20] Vivek: But if you start solving the problems of humanity you have a much higher likelihood, because there are fewer people doing it and there’s so many problems to be solved. There are literally a billion problems to be solved, you could make the world a better place and impact others in a very positive way and if you do that you might actually do very well for yourself as well.
[04:39] Vivek: So my advice to entrepreneurs always is to solve real world problems. Don’t go chasing rainbows, don’t do stupid things because you see some major capitalist do an interview about some new technology that’s hotter than investing money. Forget those people. You’re better than this.
[04:54] Unity: So your advice is focus on these big challenges, real world problems. What other advice or maybe lessons learned from your own experience as an entrepreneur would you share with entrepreneurs either in health, healthcare, or considering coming over to healthcare?
[05:12] Vivek: Healthcare is one of the most important fields there is, like I said, without health we don’t have life and then nothing matters if you don’t have it. Also, medicine is now becoming an information technology. Every part of this industry is being taken apart by technology and you can not start solving problems- when I say “being taken apart” start off with simple diagnostics.
[05:34] Vivek: Being able to now monitor the physical condition of our bodies. Everything from our temperature, to our lifestyle habits, to our fluid levels.
[05:46] Vivek: You name it, every aspect of human health can now be monitored and detected. And then you have the genome itself. The fact is that sequencing cost a doctor about a thousand dollars right now. With five years you’re talking about a hundred dollars. Ten years you’re talking about practically zero. Which means that we’ve become data and data once you have that you apply AI to it, you apply different types of analysis techniques to it and your doctors become software.
[06:12] Unity: And it’s going beyond even the genome, microbiome.
[crosstalk]
[06:18] Vivek: That’s again in a treasure trove of data that we can start gathering. So there’s so many different approaches to this thing, so many problems to be solved we can approach it from many different ways and really improve humanity itself.
[06:32] Unity: Now you wrote an article pretty recently about this concept of some companies focus on product, others focus on business model, which can be very important obviously. But the winners of the future are really focusing on building platforms and we’re seeing this in other sectors beside healthcare, can you unpack that a little? What does that mean?
[06:55] Vivek: What it means is that rather than solving one particular problem, coming up with one solution, solve a class of problems. I’ll give an example. This company in New Delhi that I wrote about which has built a device called the Swasthya Slate. What they did essentially was that they looked in medical instruments and realized that they have simple sensors which can be bought very cheaply, extremely expensive medical equipment.
[07:19] Vivek: They said what if we simply took the same sensors and put them into a tablet and fed the data and converted the signals into something that was understandable by the tablet and then we wrote our own software to analyze it. They built a platform for different medical devices.
[07:34] Vivek: This device is already saving lives in Northern India. A six hundred dollar device that can do about thirty two different medical tests now. But they chose to build a platform to add another test. What you do is you essentially open up what you’re doing so other people can build on it. This is how Apple became the most valuable company in the world is by building a platform, Itunes and the App Store are platforms.
[07:56] Unity: And they’re continuing to do it with HealthKit and ResearchKit.
[08:00] Vivek: Yeah, absolutely. But that’s what Silicon Valley figured out is that it builds, opens platforms that other people can put solutions on.
[08:10] Unity: So do you think that opportunity is still wide open in healthcare?
[08:16] Vivek: All across the border you can build a platform for analyzing genomics, you pick a particular field in medicine, you can build a platform for curing cancer. I mean I don’t know exactly what solutions entrepreneurs should build but the fact is that you can now think of solving a class of problem rather than an individual problem.
[08:36] Vivek: What this does is create a natural effect, you have other people now building on your solution and it potentially goes viral you have dozens of people, hundreds of people, thousands of people now building on your base, helping you perfect the technology and then spreading it to millions of people. This is how platforms work.
[08:57] Unity: So, we’re living in a very exciting time in history as you mentioned. Maybe take us out into the future a few years, what are your predictions? What do things look like?
[09:09] Vivek: From a healthcare point of view I see the technology industry taking over medicine. That the current system is geared towards keeping us sick. Frankly whichever way you slice it, it’s geared towards sick care. It’s not health care. We’re not preventing disease.
[09:24] Vivek: The establishment doesn’t make money if we don’t take drugs. If we don’t go to the hospital. If we don’t see doctors.
[09:29] Vivek: The good news is that the technology industry is geared towards keeping us well because all they want to do is steal our information, mine it, and sell the data.
[09:40] Vivek: So what I joke, is that Google you could take all my data to keep me healthy. But the fact is, this is an opportunity for entrepreneurs now to start building technology solutions to health and to take over the medical industry and prevent people from getting diseases in the first place.
[09:54] Unity: What’s the global lens on this? There’s probably five billion people in the world today that have access to no care at all.
[10:02] Unity: I see this as a big opportunity in the future where hopefully everyone in the world has access to care because of technology and innovation. What are your thoughts in that regard?
[10:11] Vivek: Absolutely. This is an equaliser. Technologies democratizing. Over the next three to four years you’re going to have another two or three billion people all over the world coming online on the internet. They’re going to be using smartphones and internet-connected. Now what happens is they have access to the same knowledge that we do.
[10:30] Vivek: They have access to the same apps that we do. The
sensor devices you need to be able to detect health? They’re becoming inexpensive.
[10:38] Unity: Would your advice to investors or entrepreneurs, you know everyone’s focus
on the U.S. market, not everyone, but many are focused on the U.S. market
[crosstalk]
[10:47] Vivek: There’s 300 million people whereas we have seven billion people worldwide. Why bother with the U.S. when you have so much regulation here and a system that is biased against entrepreneurs. It’s geared towards protecting itself from competition. This is what the entire medical system in the United States is.
[11:04] Vivek: Starting with the doctor’s, down to medical devices, it’s all geared towards preventing competition. Go to South America. Go to Mexico, go to Peru.
[11:12] Unity: And you think there’s a leapfrog opportunity? We’ve seen this in other areas, banking, telecommunication.
[11:18] Vivek: You can leapfrog and you can now transfer the entire system.
This is what entrepreneurs can do today.
[11:22] Unity: So what do you do to stay healthy? You mentioned at one time you had some health issues. Are you taking care of yourself and how do you
use technology to stay healthy?
[11:34] Vivek: Guilty. I’m not taking after myself. I try to go hiking and meditate and things like that, but what I’m doing right now is learning all I can and teaching.
[11:46] Unity: Teachings healthy, right?
[11:48] Vivek: Absolutely. I keep myself emotionally and intellectually engaged.
[11:52] Unity: Do you have any books that you recommend? Books or apps, things that listeners out there in the ecosystem you would highly recommend?
[12:02] Vivek: I recommend reading. All the knowledge I talk about is publicly available on the web. If you go to my website wadhwa.com you’ll see all sorts of articles. I refer to other websites and have links in there but the knowledge of the world is available to you. You don’t need to come to my website.
[12:17] Vivek: You don’t need to go into any, read any particular book. The
problem with books is by the time they are published, they are absolute already.
[12:21] Vivek: It’s how fast things are moving. Don’t waste your money on
Books. Go and follow up on all of these sites where knowledge is. In the medical
field there are dozens of amazing websites where you get free knowledge.
[12:34] Vivek: Never before have we had access to knowledge for free. The latest medical advances are available to you. The latest breakthroughs in technology are available to you The latest information about other industries is available to you all for free. Take advantage of it.
[12:47] Unity: Wonderful. Thank you so much for everything that you do and sharing your wisdom and for being here today. We really appreciate it.
[12:53] Vivek: Thanks for having me.
[12:54] Unity: Thank you. We’ll see you soon. Thank you.
[13:00] Chime
