Health Tech: Anthony Capone On How DocGo’s Technology Can Make An Important Impact On Our Overall Wellness

An Interview With Dave Philistin

Assess if the path you’re creating is good or if you’re just taking any path with the hope of one day arriving at a good ending. Consider the entire path and ask yourself if all the steps are moral — making sure that you’re not violating your ethics even a little bit for some promise of a greater good.

In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Anthony Capone.

Anthony Capone is the president of DocGo, a leading AI-powered mobile health services and transportation provider. With over 15 years of technology experience, Anthony has built one of the nation’s largest ambulance companies, managed technology at five companies from start-up to acquisition and spoken at dozens of conferences globally, including the prestigious SALT Conference. He has also founded the largest free developer conference in the U.S., Engineers4Engineers, and raised hundreds of millions of dollars in assets under management.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?

I was born and raised in Buffalo, New York, surrounded by my mom, stepdad, two older sisters and two younger brothers. I’m fortunate to come from an immensely hard-working family and doubly lucky to have parents that pushed me to work hard at a very young age.

At 12 years old, my stepfather got me involved in computers. He was in IT support at the time and, despite making a modest income, hired me a programming tutor so I could learn how to code. My first language was ColdFusion Markup Language. This jumpstarted my passion for computers and, by the time I was 14, I started my first business building websites for small businesses in my community. I would look for companies in the Yellow Pages that didn’t have websites, call them, and secure business. I still remember my first project of any note — a $7,000 website build for a lighting distributor. I felt like a millionaire. I developed websites for pizzerias, hair salons and more, and then got into repairing computers. By the time I was in high school, I branched out into software development and ended up building my school district’s online platform. I often think it was that work that kept me in school despite my antics — I got in quite a bit of trouble but was fortunate to never get expelled.

My parents believed in a work-first approach so, in addition to school and my website and computer repair jobs, I started cleaning our neighbor’s bird cages on the weekends. Would you believe it, our neighbors had 40 full-size Macaw parrots so, every Saturday, I would walk over and clean out their cages. A few months later, I also got into the roofing business, helping repair roofs around our neighborhood. Needless to stay, I worked hard and stayed busy since a young age.

When I turned 16, I got my first ‘real’ job as an assistant network administrator for Starline Industries, which provided sufficient savings to enroll at a university. In high school, I enjoyed playing lacrosse, football, and wrestling while running our computer science club and debate teams. While attending university, I switched to playing rugby, while triple majoring in computer science, constitutional law, and philosophy.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

I’m an avid traveler and have a few stories from my many adventures. A few years back, I created a fundraiser to raise money for an orphanage in Argentina. As part of this fund raise, I vowed to drive a pizza pie from Boston’s Regina’s Pizza down to an orphanage, located in the Patagonia region of Argentina. I installed a freezer in the back of my Jeep so it would still be eatable and made it down in 16 weeks, raising well over $5,000.

Back in 2011, I made it around the globe traveling easterly without hopping on a plane. I worked on ships, hopped on trains, cars and more to get around and ended up living in a Buddhist monastery for six months — it was an incredible experience and one I’m endlessly thankful for.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

My parents, particularly my stepfather. I can’t overemphasize this enough. There is an innumerable array of important human characteristics, but at the top of that list is a strong work ethic. In life, you can accomplish anything you put your mind to with a strong work ethic and nothing without it. And my stepfather, in his own way, taught me how to work very hard at a very young age — to the point it was second nature. I’d come home from school, start fixing computers, designing sites, then cleaning bird cages on the weekend.

When I was 13, I remember coming home on the last day of school before summer break, buzzing about my summer prospects. My stepfather was sitting at the table and signaled to me to come over and sit with him and an unknown gentleman. He said he had great news — that this man had agreed to employ me at his roofing company full-time for the summer. I can still feel the disappointment and anguish of that moment to this day. Instead of spending the summer at the pool with my friends, I repaired roofs, carried shingles, and applied hot sticky tar every single day. At the time, I thought it was one of the worst things my parents could do to me — but in hindsight, I couldn’t be more thankful to my stepfather for pushing me the way he did. It has brought immense value to my life. After bird poop and hot tar, it’s all been uphill since then.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Professionally, I try to delegate everything I can do myself and nothing I cannot. Most people believe the opposite is true, but that is a very limiting approach. By delegating what you can and know how to do yourself, you’re able to effectively tell if people properly performed the job. Even at DocGo, there are very few jobs that I haven’t done myself at some point, and I continue to push myself to learn new jobs as they arise. Every day is an opportunity to go outside our comfort zone. An opportunity to discover not only a part of life previously unknown, but a part of ourselves previously underutilized.

Personally, living in the moment and by the truth of my experience is critical. I’m a devout Vipassana meditator — which enables me, when I’m practicing well, to observe objectively what’s going on in my mind and body in the moment. Vipassana is not about faith or devotions, but simply observing what’s happening in our bodies at that moment, observing the truth of our reality.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

An indefatigable work ethic. Everyone believes they have strong work ethic, but strength is relative. I believe you must lead by example and push yourself to go beyond what is necessary. You can’t always be smarter than others, but you can out work them.

Moral resolve — what is good, is good for you. I believe we should constantly strive to do what is good, without compromising our morals. Although not always obvious or intuitive, acting with morality is always beneficial in both the short and long term.

Lastly, constantly surround yourself with people who are better than you. When I was 14, I had the fortune of being in the same room with Warren Buffet. Someone asked him to share his key to success, to which he responded he always surrounds himself with people that are smarter than him. It’s natural to feel threatened by someone obviously better than ourselves. But overcoming this feeling can provide the most incredible opportunities to grow.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive impact on our wellness. To begin, which particular problems are you aiming to solve?

We’re solving a major societal issue. Currently, there is an imbalance in our healthcare system. In America, you can find high quality healthcare or affordable healthcare. But it is nearly impossible to find high quality, highly affordable healthcare in the U.S. I believe our unique position, innovative business model and technology platform provide such access. We can take the premium healthcare, generally reserved for the rich and famous, and offer it at a 50% to 70% cost savings. We’ve taken high quality concierge services and are now offering them to the undeserved.

How do you think your technology can address this?

On the high-quality side, our technology helps ensure immediate real time transparency for the patient and our clinicians. Technology demands a rigorous amount of transparency, and we can ensure high degrees of clinical care and the patient experience.

When it comes to affordable healthcare, our technology significantly drives down costs by creating efficiencies. We’ve invested a great deal of capital into building out one of the most sophisticated medical scheduling and routing systems in the world. We have incredible utilization rates and can charge substantially less for home visits and other medical services. We can leverage our proprietary AI platform and predictive analytics to estimate and forecast transportation times, scheduling, and more, thus eliminating idle time and maximize efficiency.

Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?

I think a part of me was looking for redemption — after years in finance, I wanted an opportunity to use my skills, talent, and experience to help the underserved population. Much of my career was spent helping people with money make more money. It was time to help those who needed it most and health is something we cannot undervalue. Our CEO Stan Vashovsky had this idea of revolutionizing the ambulance space, driven by his medical background and personal experience. I was immediately inspired to be a part of his vision. And we soon realized that not only could we solve medical transportation, but we could truly evolve the greater healthcare industry for the better.

How do you think this might change the world?

DocGo is an incredible position to change the world and I couldn’t be prouder to be a part of this team. We have already started making waves across the country, and I believe that soon, we will be able to facilitate high-quality health access to underserved people throughout the U.S. We have the potential to help people on Medicare or Medicaid, the homeless population and anyone else who cannot afford preventative care. I believe that, once the underserved population can afford high quality care, they will be able to truly become active members of our society and contribute to the greater good. There are extremely intelligent individuals that are capable of greatness but held back by health issues. When they start receiving high quality care, incredible things will happen for them and those around them, not to mention the economy.

Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?

In general, the speed at which healthcare startups are going to market these days creates several cybersecurity challenges. Most businesses do not spend sufficient time building their infrastructure to protect patient data. Fortunately, my background in computer science gave me both an appreciation and understanding of cybersecurity. It’s an area we’re always mindful of because any disclosures of patient information can have massive ramifications.

Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)

1. Ask yourself — what is the value being provided? Don’t worry about if it’s cool or even useful; instead focus on the value being created and whom it is for. Everyone thinks their ideas are genius, but are they valuable and is that value greater than the associated costs?
2. When you create the tech, consider whom it is possibly displacing. Are there people who will be negatively impacted and lose their jobs? A great example of this are taxi cabs and Ubers in cities like New York.
3. Consider all those involved. Is the technology being built using or encouraging exploitative labor practices? Ensure you are providing a fair wage, especially if you are creating tech for good.
4. Assess if the path you’re creating is good or if you’re just taking any path with the hope of one day arriving at a good ending. Consider the entire path and ask yourself if all the steps are moral — making sure that you’re not violating your ethics even a little bit for some promise of a greater good.
5. Quickly discover the true motivations of your partners. I don’t recommend going into any new venture alone; so, when choosing partners, ensure they are motivated by the right things because eventually their motivations will become yours.

If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?

What is good is good for you. If every single day you aim to help others, you will feel fulfilled and purposeful. Focusing solely on oneself is shallow and not long lasting, because we are highly dependent organisms. Improve the world that you’re dependent upon and those dependencies will improve you.

Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna, inventors of the CRISPR gene editing technique. This technique will likely serve as a foundation for the greatest accomplishments in modern medicine.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Much like other leaders, I am active on LinkedIn and always happy to connect with new people. However, I will say that, instead of following my accounts, I encourage you check out www.dhamma.org. If interested in the practice, one can sign up for a free 10-day meditation that may just change their life. It’s a practice I follow and encourage others to do as well.

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.