Healing.Healthtech July Premium Content Drop
Three new premium pieces for healthtech founders, investors, and operators: risk, raising, and the right to exist
Three premium pieces are live for subscribers, all asking the same question: how does a healthtech venture earn its right to exist?
Skim the following summaries for a quick tour, then go dig in.
Right to Exist: Episode 1, Lactation Support at Population Scale
Andrea Ippolito - Simplifed
30 Minute Video / Podcast
The most common category error made by founders, investors, and operators in digital health is believing that GTM, venture design, and stakeholder alignment are distinct disciplines. The best operators execute these as an integrated whole.
Right to Exist is a new interview series on how founders earn their project’s right to exist, from the wedge to the moat to the human impact they aspire to.
The ACA in 2010 required health plans to cover lactation support at no cost. Despite this, when Andrea started Simplifed in 2019, fewer than 15% of lactation consultants billed insurance, and only 4% of those claims got paid. Andrea built the 50 state clinical practice to deliver a mandated benefit new moms desperately needed that almost nobody was serving.
We get into why interoperability became her moat, the five-body problem of enterprise healthcare adoption, what she would sequence differently if she were building today, and her advice for other orphaned and understaffed clinical domains like peds asthma, osteoporosis, HRT, and others.
How to Own Risk Without Getting Pwned (Part 1 of 2)
20 Minute Read
Start-ups love to put “owning risk” into their roadmaps.
Bright Health went public at $11.2B and wound down its insurance business two years later on a 101.3% medical cost ratio.
Meanwhile, Kinetic, an NYC wearables company, started with a buzzer on a warehouse worker’s belt and is now living the VC startup dream.
It created a new multi-billion dollar category that it now dominates.
Same phrase, “taking risk,” two outcomes that could not be further apart. This guide separates the four distinct things people call risk, then hands you a five element framework to determine how and when to take risk, the failure modes and the multi-billion dollar startups that fell into them, and four diagnostic instruments to place any company on the map.
In Part 2 (live July 15th), we’ll use live examples of 4 very different companies tackling high risk pregnancy outcomes and close with a nine-question diligence memo to evaluate both your own work and that of your portcos.
Venture Funding for Fun and Profit: Part II, The Process
40 minute read
What does it actually take to raise a 6/7 figure angel or pre-seed round?
Where do you find angels?
What does a first e-mail or call look like?
How should the overall process run?
I provide the framework that I’ve taught for years along with detailed instructions on how to execute, measure, and course correct a raise that isn’t going as planned.
I’ve also done original research here to help you manage both expectations and execution on your fundraise - especially if you’re outside of NYC or SF. Tabulated and scored lessons from 50 verified first-person raises, roughly 4,500 investor names worked, more than $150M closed across three continents.
This is the seven-phase process built from it, from filing your 83(b)s to chasing the last wire that won’t land, written for founders who don’t have the network the standard advice quietly assumes.
All three are behind the paywall for premium subscribers. As I continue to experiment with the Substack format, my goal is both provide free actionable content and give folks who a taste of how electric our in-person events these past years have been.
If you know a founder, operator, or investor who would use any of these, forward it their way.
Only New Mistakes.
— Vadim