596th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Julien Pham, Third Culture Capital

Julien Pham is Founder and Managing Director at Third Culture Capital (3CC), a firm focused on investing in the healthcare space.

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Building a Capital Efficient Healthcare AI Venture to $20M: Deepak Gaddipati, Founder and CTO of VirtuSense (Part 1)

Deepak has built a capital-efficient fall-detection company from Peoria, Illinois with a backend engineering team in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

It’s an impressive entrepreneurial journey with a mission-driven company that is making real impact in the lives of seniors with fall risk.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Praava Health CEO Sylvana Sinha, Bangladesh (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What is the segmentation? What percentage of that 25 million can afford your service?

Sylvana Sinha: We believe that a third of them can afford our service. We are starting out with eight centers in Dhaka in the next three years. Then we would like to go beyond.

Sramana Mitra: Are you profitable?

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Praava Health CEO Sylvana Sinha, Bangladesh (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about the team.

Sylvana Sinha: Today we have 450 people. My Chief Medical Officer is an amazing woman. She has been working in healthcare for more than 40 years. She’s an expert in quality management. Her husband was a diplomat, so she’s lived and worked all over the world.

She moved back to Bangladesh 12 years ago. She had been working as the Head of Quality at a large private hospital in Bangladesh. She had gone into retirement and I convinced her to come out of retirement. She has been with us since 2017.

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Praava Health CEO Sylvana Sinha, Bangladesh (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is the pricing model?

Sylvana Sinha: We like to say we are offering more value for money. We price at market. It’s in between the fancy private hospitals and the free and affordable care. To see a doctor, it’s less than $8. To see a specialist might cost $12 to $15. We acquire patients through consultations or through the pharmacy. We upsell them to longer-term patients through diagnostic testing and health checks. The most profitable part of the business is diagnostics testing.

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Praava Health CEO Sylvana Sinha, Bangladesh (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s focus on the first year. What did you build to qualify yourself for funding?

Sylvana Sinha: I spent that year on a listening tour. I was traveling all over the world to meet entrepreneurs and investors to understand business models and innovations in healthcare. I funded myself to do that and just live during that time.

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Praava Health CEO Sylvana Sinha, Bangladesh (Part 1)

We love pioneering entrepreneurs. Sylvana is working on upgrading the healthcare system in Bangladesh. Wonderful, inspiring story!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some background about your own journey. How did you get going with Praava Health?

Building a Medication Management Startup Through Multiple Pivots: Medisafe Co-Founder and CTO Rotem Shor (Part 1)

Rotem represents yet another point of view of a software developer/technologist who successfully transitioned to an entrepreneur in an unfamiliar domain: pharmaceutical.

In that journey, he paired up with his brother who was more the business person in the duo. This is a common strategy for developers to become entrepreneurs, although, I generally
believe that developers can learn the business side as well.

The story also traces the pivots that were necessary to find product-market fit, as well as the failures that triggered each pivot.