Eren Bali & Adeo Ressi on Building Enduring Startups

[Music] for everyone here we started just under 15 years ago in a garage in pal Alto and

shortly after we started the company uh I you know I programmed everything I built the website wrote the curriculum all this stuff we we ran our first class

in in Stanford and a lot of times uh in the founder Institute this has been true almost throughout the history of the organization

like you know for lack of a better way of saying it would be up until the last minute and then everything worked out right and that was like oh my God every like the internet

didn't work this didn't happen stuff was broken people were late and then it's like it started and it went really great

and so the very first uh session uh minted one of the the the best Founders in our history because not

only does this founder have one unicorn under his belt which would came out of that program he's gone on and built a second

unicorn uh and on top of that you may have heard one of his investors on stage earlier Jed mention that he would be here later today and super proud of him

so let's give a big round of applause for Aaron Bali to come on stage [Music] [Applause] woo hey do hey man good to see you good

to see you uh so I have the distinct honor of continuing to be an advisor for Aaron today and what you're building

your second unicorn is amazing so your first unicorn was udemy how many people here have used udemy holy crap you know it's like like if I were to ask like how many people

here use Google it would be like the same number of hands of course it one person that's like what's Google and probably the same thing like one person they're like What's you to me uh so

that's pretty impressive now um and and so every I I get it's safe to say everyone here raise their hand so everyone knows you to me is why don't you we're going to go through the history why don't you just start by

telling us about your newest unicorn carbon Health yeah so uh new company carbon out we are a technology enabled healthcare provider essentially the visible part of the business is two

things when is we have 125 clinics around the country in 13 states um these are Urgent Care primary care clinics and other other part of the business is we

build every single piece of technology needed for healthcare delivery we built inh house so we built the EHR the care delivery practice management billing patient app essentially we own the 100%

of the technology stack so we can actually do like whatever we imagine doing we we do it right so we kind of control both the patient experience and provider experience very intimately um and and the goal is like

has always been using technology and design to make great Healthcare accessible to everyone right and that is a type of the goal you don't get through go from zero to one you just gradually

go there so we made things we built a experience that we want for ourselves and made it accessible with with your insurance without any subscription fees made it very accessible but this that

still doesn't get to 100% that gets to I don't know maybe 70% of the US can access it but the eventual goal is to like get kind of take all the learnings and really using software ultimate more

and more on the care so maybe one day we might have a healthcare kind of AI powered Healthcare that billions of people around the world can use so so that is actually the outcome but that's Universal Health universally accessible

amazing Healthcare but we are kind of Step by Step going there yeah I mean I'm a customer it's amazing I I kind of

don't have a primary care physici because if I need something I just go to carbon health and it's got a beautiful app it's got beautiful clinics uh or

urgent care centers it's like a really amazing experience um but let's let's go back we'll come into we'll go more into that in a bit so

you came here from Turkey uh you came into the founder Institute and and you wanted to launch something it was originally a business networking maybe

so so talk to me about the I know your background I don't need the Sheep talk to me about that that that initial founder Journey you had uh in the very

very beginning and and you have so many lessons here that will help people but let's start at the beginning yeah so I'll go even even earlier than that so

uh I mean I I grew up in Turkey went to high school there college there and the expected um career P for me was being a math professor I had International Awards in mathematics International math

olympas if anybody else here has been so I was expected to be an acade academician mathematician but during the College Years I built an application

which was a music uh like like a if you guys remember VAP it was a vam clone that worked on your browser that I built in 2001 that was way before I knew that this things like Google and other

companies are like businesses I thought those are all somebody's like hobby projects so but I kind of really enjoyed building the product building a product

and have people use it so and then in like in 2007 in Turkey I decided to build a platform for teaching online so I was looking at blogger and YouTube as

kind of platforms that that democratize publishing a video or article my thought was simply like somebody should be able to do the same thing for Education space so we built a and at that point we were

to more of a live education platform so built the platform in 2007 launched in Turkey uh didn't go anywhere uh and I realized that we were in the wrong time uh wrong time wrong place and we had the

wrong product so wrong wrong place was Turkey right just like I realized for that idea to work you needed to you need the density of influence like so and

wrong time was like 2007 was early even in US standards right because the bandwidths were not were slow people were not online as often and the wrong product was the live market education

Marketplace so marketplaces have big liquidity risk and if you do try to do this live it's just like it becomes even harder to solve so and then I think what

the the the four years after the original kind of Ki Kickstarter is um I somehow migrated to the US I now how have finded my US Passport so but for a

long time I'll tell you I travel for the first time with us passport it's amazing so like anybody who already had always had it doesn't know how how awesome it

is so um so it just took us a while to come to us but essentially what we gave up in Turkey I came to us uh we built a

product for some local newspaper uh company and and I saw about so F Institute like and fund Institute was one of the really only incubators which

were accepting people who are not able to do it full-time because I was on an H1 Visa working at another company so it was a lot more flexible a lot more International so we thought okay this is

like the program for us so we joined f with that or that idea of like taking the product we had built for that newspaper company and maybe make it making it a social network so I think

like ad told me that that just idea was kind of like not a great idea and at this point I said like I do can I take like 10 more minutes of your time he said yes I said like I want to show you something we gave up on this idea before

but I feel like there was something here like and I showed Udi's original udmi I said like here's a platform you can upload videos you presentations you can sync things you can do live classes we

buil a quite a bit of a product so and he saw and he said look hly I would just completely ignore the other idea but there is something here you should just only focus on this one right so you

remember that yeah I remember yesterday I mean he had this like sh excuse my friend shitty uh idea for a uh sorry and many of you have probably heard me say

that to you as well don't take it personally see he didn't take it personally and I'm like oh man I don't know if this and then he shows me this education thing it's built out it's really beautiful it's well built and I'm

like yeah I mean I remember it like yesterday and and it wasn't finished but it was good enough that you're like that's some there's something here that

could be amazing and yeah now it it it didn't come out the gate like a racehorse I think what was it like you did poker education or something like so

I mean yeah honestly even so you is one of those interesting businesses like unusual where the original idea turned out to be a good idea but it was very unobvious that it was a good idea for

like four years maybe right so it's just like like we actually did not really pivot almost at all it's just that we just everybody thought it was a bad idea it turned out to be a good idea it turned out that be were right and by the

way we weren't sure it wasn't like I was sure it was a good idea and I didn't care about what other people people thought when everybody else said is a bad idea I thought they are probably right but this is the only idea I have

so um so essentially what happened is like we and the other thing I do told is like I needed to find a business co-founder to get like instructors like I was a technical co-founder building

the products uh doing things like that so now your English is a lot better now let's just be super clear and I know when he said um he can be some no offense you can

sometimes be hard to understand but it was like really hard to understand so the business co-founder was like a dual purpose right a get some business Acumen

and then like if you need to do Partnerships or whatever you were guaranteed to be understood so yeah honestly that was the other thing that like sometimes people take it wrong but I didn't take it

personally I took that lesson as a good lesson I just acted up on it uh so generally one people who know me like for in my board know that I I almost don't take anything personal I like I

just act on it so um so yeah that was definitely the right call if he was being polite I probably go nowhere we be going nowhere right so I met gagan who was also in the fundra Institute and we

kind of paired up um and we started building the product but was like it wasn't clear I think the it's one of the things like the common sense told us like everybody told us we had to focus

on a vertical and this is exactly what we did we say okay the idea of a platform to learn anything just like felt stupid to pretty much everybody who heard about it so we said okay we should

pick a vertical we listed hundred different kind of verticals like programming and Entrepreneurship and play gaming music education and we just

made a like a your stand like Mak style points like how e to acquire customers are people willing to pay for this how many users are there we just analyze every vertical a very scientific kind of

methodology and we kind of decided that the best vertical to launch you was a professional poker so because people how that happened one that in very interesting yeah but but but honestly

like people were willing to pay for it there was no certification requirement because one of the big the most common criticism to udis idea was that people nobody would spend their own money and

own time on learning a skill unless there's a diploma attached to it so pro pro poker was one of the things where you don't need a diploma uh you can learn online it's just it felt like the

best idea so we had like bunch of I would say bad goto Market motions which didn't go anywhere but eventually we launched the website we did some Scrappy stuff and it it started working after a

while yeah so I mean I remember and you would kind of iterate through them right it wasn't just poker you did like you did do entrepreneurship at one point you did a few you and right then it started

getting traction but it you had a tough founder Journey let's be clear this was not like H then one day it was worth a billion dollars right it was

like right so so how long did it take you from inception to when you really had the traction and maybe walk me through then you had some challenges with funding but at some point it

started having what was clearly Breakaway success yeah if I like just going to with the days like 2009 November is when the program finished I the fund in the program uh so we had

something that looked like the product we spent the next one month over like New Year's break which is my most like uh productive time of the year every year around Christmas to New Year like

that's when I can of build the new new things so so we launch in Jan we incorporate the company in January of 2010 and tried to go raise money failed at it but people were interested like we

had we were showing something that looked interesting to people people look at it but everybody can pass and then we said okay maybe we should launch the product before we raise money we spent took another four months launched the

company in May of 2010 uh so and at that time like we kind of we are still working full-time in another companies actually if I go back

a little bit like the way I founded uh udis turkey uh version was I was working at night for a Silicon Valley startup so I was getting paid my full-time Silicon Valley salary and splitting among like

like four people we had in the Turkish entity so I was daytime working at in turkey with my team night at night I was working with silal compan a full-time engineer that was how I was fing it so

when I came here it was end up being the opposite so daytime I'm on a Visa still working at the start same startup and at night from like I don't know something

like 7 900 p.m. to 2: p.m 2: am. we

would actually work on UD um and that was the time where like by the way in startups you'd actually leave the office at 8:30 so that wasn't like the 5:00 p.m. you leave office days those are

p.m. you leave office days those are like the 8:30 you leave the office days so so we kind of still like not full-time on it but like we launched the product tried to raise money again I

remember we went to K was one of so he passed on us again but he then made more introductions um and then we then started we said okay you know what maybe just launching is not enough we have to

get some traction so we started working with some early ideas to get traction we get some traction but it look like some inklink of traction and then we went to investors the third time and this was actually the last and this was the end

of the rout like I remember gagan was thinking okay like like he started making like looking for new jobs uh we were have to be having to pay like yeah he was going to move back maybe didn't

see yeah yeah I like I was not able to pay the kind of Hosting costs like anymore so it was we were it was essentially end of the road for us if it didn't work but the third time I remember like kitu and Ross freed and we

kind of met them in the same day and kid said like I still don't think this a good idea but every time you guys come back to me you come back with a lot of progress so he said like look if we make

progress this fast eventually get to something so he kind of he signed the first check uh which is $50,000 so and and hours later Ros FR then who

now I work with so um he was a mentor at fer insud he also just said you know like you guys are making progress so fast despite not being full-time he's basically idea was look if you can make this much progress without any money if

you and you get more money you'll get more make more progress so he he gave us he he the same day they both said yes and five of their friends each also joined the round so we were able to

raise our first round and then after that we were able to go full-time on the idea so again it was still like problematic like I got my Visa my co-founder his Visa didn't get approved

so he had to go back to Turkey so it was like a tough like time to get off the off on our feet but we eventually I would say like that was 2010 and 2011 we

launched the first paid courses and and those actually the first paid course worked decently like I think we sold $3,000 worth of licenses for the first course and then after that was a nice

kind of like every month it started growing I think we grew 20 more than 20% month or month for the first five years after that so it was like small numbers

initially like $3,000 five N9 eventually became 100,000 per month 120 would just go but it just kept we just kept it growing for like almost five five years

like with that kind that level of Bas right so Wow first of all wow right like come on guys that's sort of the story that

everybody here wants right in your own version okay so you you got there and and you know now it's a went public all this stuff so yeah like we don't need to

go through every step after that because it's kind of not super relevant but like what were like some highlights to the IPO that you want to share you

definitely had some investor challenges yeah no I mean it it wasn't easy honest it was also like we we were always facing with this issue that like we were

not high-profile Founders so I think we got under we were like the underdog in education market for a long time so remember like we started a company we were growing we have Revenue news and

one and a half years later corsera and udasis they both kind of launch rough in the same time and they were very high-profile Founders that they got like $20 million seed RS when we were like super happy that we have a million

dollar so they got maybe at 50 times more pressed than us and they got all the like top investors like a lot of high-profile people joined them so and essentially like for a while like we

thought it wasn't clear that we would be the successful company from that Bunch but I think the the interesting thing for me that was that everybody in Sil Valley really like the idea of like

Stanford professors teaching Mission learning and AI right because that's what they want to learn but fundamentally what we I believe specially very very strongly is that for

every one person who can learn machine learning from a Stanford Professor there's like a thousand people who need to learn some excels to get their first white color job or they need to learn

some python or WordPress to May build a website for the around the corner so I always thought like the what you was teaching that kind of more skill based learning had a like an order manic to

larger relevance to the entire world than kind of like courses from Iva colleges in us right so and I think this is one of the things where like I'm I'm

a very big fan of like first principles thinking so I try to really avoid like what other companies are doing what people are saying I just like even by the way sometimes like the smartest people on Earth say something and you

still have to ignore it right so just like just taking all those people are very successful are good at their job very well known they think this is the future and it just doesn't make sense didn't make sense to me I thought like

there's a I just know the world like the world has a lot more people who need like some skill based learning and interestingly what happened is the five six years after that almost all the other companies kind of pivoted into

udage business right so essentially our model turned out to be like the kind of model that actually made sense on scale uh so other companies slowly appear into what we were doing instead of but for a long time we we had pressure to putot

into their business right so you you ended up staying the course getting the scale going public right that's

incredible uh you left as CEO right that was pretty challenging too um I I I want to be sensitive of time I mean I can talk with you for hours because I think

there's so many lessons here um why don't we your parents were Educators right so there was a big you had a big deep passion about education Beyond just

you know helping people learn Excel you you felt the calling to that field right yeah so I mean if you go all the way back right so I was born in a very small

village in southeast part of turkey so that was kind of 1980s uh that area was under like actual Gilla conflict so there was martial

martial law then I kind of grew up there um and there was a time where like we um essentially almost none of no teachers want to go work in that region so everybody quit would all the teachers

would quit their job if they were assigned to that region so my parents are both teachers and my mom was a teacher that the active like my father was not after 1980 military coup like he

he was a political activist so he lost his job at the time uh so so my mom like and because there were no other teachers work in that region they moved back to our village and she was the only teacher

in that entire area like not just like that school that just like entire area so all the kids would come to our village and she had lined up all kind of classes like first grade second grade third grade fourth grade fifth grade

should teach the first graders for like I don't know half an hour okay you do now you continue reading switch to second graders teach the mber switch third graders fourth graders she was

essentially the only teacher like for the entire school so so essentially I had this like kind of taught from like early childhood that and actually the to me the impressive thing wasn't like what

I personal dat which is what the Press usually kind of holds on to like even despite that level of Education because there was no other thing that you can do right like there's an area which no

industry no factories you can hurt animals you can be like um a Shepherd or you have to get educated so like kids would like go from like walk 20 miles in

snow every day and they would miss a day of the skull so kind of the idea that like people all around the world has a lot more potential than the a reach they had was like this kind of thing

ingrained in my head so like I mean we would go there like we actually some some of the students would like kind of uh turn on the heater and somebody would cut wood and bring it to this class and

some of the the students would actually clean the school right this was like a sitation like there's one teacher kids do all the work and despite that like they would actually really hold on to

the like the all inkling of Education they had so that that that to me was like the inspiration like lifetime inspiration and to me like when I met internet for the first time because my

my older sister was going to college and my parents like there's a long story that but somehow we got a we got a computer that year right so one because my older sister was going to go to

college and I I got access to Internet and to me like was such a big shift like okay all of a sudden now like now there's like a like a whole world opens

up to you that wasn't open so I kind of had this thought that eventually internet will become everybody's Prim learning destination that was like this idea I had in early 2000s and back then

it felt like a crazy idea and now it's very obvious right so it's obviously if somebody says I learned something you assume they learned online but I thought okay this thing is going to become where people learn things so that idea was

like very early on like and I had different formats of doing it but in 2007 became like a product that's closer to what we have today yeah and and it seemed crazy at the time and in fact all

the investors yesterday at the Des all Summit which is the counterpart to this event for just venture capitalist we're like the crazier the idea the better

basically but so let's let's switch because I'm I'm sensitive time here let's talk a little bit about carbon health because you tackled and kind of one in the education space which is

amazing and now you're going after also a very difficult arguably harder space which is you know Healthcare in America which is like you know if healthc care

is hard healthc care in America is like you know if you can make it in New York you can make it anywhere kind of thing

uh but yeah so so how'd that come about and and have you been humbled yet or we can go a little late yeah okay I I've

been humbled more than more than I ever anticipated but except everybody told me it was going to happen so it's not I cannot complain so Sally the the

backstory that is in 2004 uh sorry 14 I was still the found of udmi UD is growing very fast um and my mom had this completely unexplained stroke so Essen

all of a sudden she couldn't move any part of her body and there's no sad story she recovered so just kind of don't want to make the Hur the tone but like so she had this unexplained stroke and it wasn't she not have a blood clot

she did not have cancer she not have any other the traditional kind of stroke um Sim like kind of underlying causes and my sister is a physician so she's a

nuclear medicine specialist so she lined up bunch of her professors which kind of started taking my actually take my mom's medical records to each Professor to understand what was happening right and

we had TSS of pages of documents M pest scans lab results um and one of the the professor number 13 was this neurologist

and she said the blood result look like an autoimmune disease called sarcosis right which is um but she said like but it that would not normally impact neuros system but

she had once read on popet that sometimes sosis could happen in neural system and she applied a treatment worked perfectly my mom recovered but at the time the kind of first thought I I had was like it's so crazy that the Best

in Class care still relies on the number of patients one provider one doctor has seen before right so my original idea was like building a technology platform which kind of build something like a

Wikipedia for medical record so imagine like a highly structured data set data source of like millions of patients medical records so that if you have a problem you can't just say here is I

have a patient that that looks like this and the system would actually py like intelligently bring together other patient which might look similar and this like a very difficult technology problem so that was originally the very

kind of directly associated with my mom's case I was like what could I be so the next time something like this happens there's there's a solution so that was original idea which adio knows right so most people don't know this

version of idea except adio so so I have I have to be clear so so I built that without having any business model thinking but once we built the original plan was maybe we partner with UCSF and

Stanford and Export their medical records to our system and then intelligently organize it and just be like a build a tool around it and while I was doing it I kind of not to students

one is the medical record data was like horeshit so it was like that it was low quality unstructured a lot of them was copy pasted text from some templates and actually I also realized doctors were

making their tra like applying this treatments and they they come up with the diagnosis and they usually write the medical the charts maybe one or two days after the visit and they just like retroactively write a story that

perfectly matches what they already did so I realized that essentially and that was very different than like things like case journals that I was getting inspiration from right so and I kind of said you know like if you really need to

fix us Healthcare you need to own the technology platform on the heart of the Healthcare System you just can't you can't just dance around this shitty platform you have to build a better one and I was thinking okay if you build an

amazing EHR a lot of people use it and then it can come up with the data value in the future and then as as I got into it I realized also the consumer experience is horrible and the patient

experience is bad and like you don't get access to your records easily so like we almost got suckered into like just the like idea the problem became bigger and bigger and bigger real realized we just had to build everything from the ground

lab and we say you know like if that's what it takes to fix Healthcare we just let's just go build build everything so we built everything one by one from the ground up and eventually realized we even need to own the Kinex to be able to

do this like in the way we want to do to be an example to the world about how it should be functioning so and then we we had three clinics and at that point

there was a moment where also Capital became very cheap so we kind of thought okay we could actually grow this very fast F we went from three clinics to 3 to 13 in a year and then 13 to 40 40 to

125 so like in consecutive years I get tripled the size of the operations and these are clinics by the way this isn't like you know uh websites or whatever

these are like physical locations with doctors and nurses medical equipment so it's not the easiest thing to scale I think we Bliss scaled the physical operations for the first time uh and

again at that time that was a good idea so in today's today's world I would actually do more slowly so but we kind of scaled up and and I think what actually was also interesting is that

like owning the clinics really helped us understand the full scale of the problem right because I think if you just build s you don't see the full like kind of spectrum of the problems so we have been

building a lot of like um machine learning AI solutions from like day one right so we always had it and we got to a place where like the only way to provide the quality of experience we provide want to provide and the cost we

want to provide has been actually using AI to automate a lot of different parts of care so and because our own con we can actually deploy this on scale and I think we finally got to a place where now we are licensed software to other

companies so it's not just carbon's on clinex so essentially it took us essentially six years to build a viable tech technology first platform to

deliver care and Final in a very robust shape and we actually just launched to our first pure software customers and I was expecting some issues here and there

but like T me completely painless like we kind of did we overnight deployed our software to them it's like a million dollar AR customers the first pure software customer and we have some larger customers so for like after six

or seven years we now have this like I I I I don't want to say most modern Healthcare de software I would say the the only modern Healthcare de platform in the world so and it it is like it

took like whatever we had to do it that was a bare minimum you had to do to get there yeah and a bare minimum is a lot right 100 plus clinics you know working

with lots of patients Reinventing the entire healthc care stack now I I'm sure there are lots of people that have questions here um and so prep your

questions we do have time for them uh and and I have tons of questions but I I'll leave with one and then open it up to the group so you've you are like a

great founder right and and really you you you I'm super proud of you I think you're amazing um I love working with

you and you have a you do think about things in a very good and healthy way right so what are some maybe attributes

of your thinking that has helped you be successful that you could share so that everyone here can can maybe copy what

feels right for them to be successful in their own right yep so a couple things I think in personality

style um I I like him like trying to improve myself so uh I was a Founder UD and UD was a successful company growing fast I could just argue my I was like an

A+ CEO but I didn't feel that way I felt like I was being like a B minus CEO right so it was very exclusive focus on product and technology and customer acquisition I realized that we also had

to be good at um operations and customer support and finance so like I was kind of not as well rounded so like when I was started you me carbon Health one of the things I want to do was just get get

to get really good at everything else I was not necessarily good at so I kind of I spent a lot of time learning about finance and operations and even things like building an organization team so I

think I've been a much better CEO like it just purely like a like a score card not just like almost outside Company Success you to like I I grade myself and actually as as my said like like be

brutally honest with me like what could I have done better and people said things and for example I was not good at communicating back then right so just first of all you're a you're not a native speaker there's always an

addition barrier to get over right it's a lot harder to be charismatic in somebody else's language so so essentially but I kind of forced myself I got coaching accent coaching I got

writing coaching I've been working with a writing coach for a couple hours every week for the last five years so we just sit done and right and I've gotten from has having never written something long

to now like pretty decent at writing right so and the reason I was pushing that is because I thought if you have a large organization writing is the most scalable way to lead a company So eventually if you're 30 people 50 people

can communicate with your team and they can be on board with you if you have a thousand people like we now have 2500 employees like so you need to be able to more scalably pass your thoughts and in

a kind of M like in a way you kind of put put up there and that lives by itself so I think I invested quite a bit on just improving myself like throughout

the journey in terms of the business I I actually really just kind of enjoy building things and solving the problems you are so and that becomes contagious like when like average person average

investor average potential employee who meets you realizes that you actually care about what you're talking uh about um and at Carbon Health like I was very

keen on wanting I was like I want to do something where if it doesn't work out if it all goes to zero I want to feel like it was still worth the effort so

and I still feel that that way but like it is like who knows what what happens in the world of business and think markets crash like but whether it becomes a massive financial success or

not right so like the stuff we build is like to me undeniably good for the world like like it is just like we have done things for the first time we show the market how it should be done like I like

even it goes all goes to zero I wouldn't regret for a second so like all that for we put in I think like you just have to feel that way about what you're doing like otherwise if you're purely

opportunist looking at an idea when things get get tough usually kind of lean on giving up so but if you really care about like you think about what you're building as just like aside from

Financial outcome is like good for good for the world like so kind of that keeps you going yeah and you've definitely done some hard things first of all big

round of applause that's [Applause] awesome all right let's get some

questions in uh anyone in the audience you want to raise your hand we'll have some mics over to you come on you gotta have some questions I have lots of questions we got one over

there okay so so two question questions actually um so speak closer to the mic sorry um so are youi you're familiar with the Epic software right like that's

one of your competitors um so like oh sorry yes I mean do I answer immediately okay so yeah epic is the like the dominant inati

Hospital based electronic health record software company yeah so we we are very familiar um and it's one of the like epic does it is better than is less bad

than the alternatives so they've dominated the impatient Hospital markets we are more focused on outpatient and in outpatient especially like we wouldn't

be ready for an impatient hospital yet but if you just look at Epic and our platform like if you look at Epic it kind of hurts your eyes when you look at it so where look at ours it looks like

the modern platforms you have you are used to using okay yeah I was just wondering if that was a a problem that you were tackling like I I I personally like was kind of born with like uh I've had medical issues my whole life so like

I'm a little familiar with that issue as well um and doctors hate epic so yeah like it's it's that I think you'd make a lot of people really really happy um

once you did tackle the uh the impatient issue like yeah look that's the heart of the what you because what one thing I realized after joing the healthcare space is

there's zero unemployment among doctors which means we have fewer doctors than what we need right and as people get older like as the average age goes up we our Healthcare needs will will go up

exponentially right so Essen we'll have even bigger shortage of doctors and really just like making doctors happy enjoy their job is by far the most critical things you have to do in healthcare like if you're if you have a

solution which patients love more but the doctors don't love more or doctors are not more efficient it just doesn't work because your actual hard Supply constraint is in the is in the provider side that's why I think this whole we are doing a lot we are pretty much

leading the market using AI in healthcare and that work is extremely important because that's the only way we can actually kind of solve the doctor

shortage other question other questions anyone uh so my name is Raj I'm the founder and CEO of oto.com so we are into education technology space as well

could could you speak up sorry it's hard to hear you okay my name is Raj I'm from uta.com so we are in education technology space as well the whole

reason honestly we joined fer Institute because we saw Udo there and you know it's like you know you're a poster boy for institute honestly like it's it's right there on the website when you

visit it so I was like okay you know I definitely want to apply to forer Institute and it was like really really important for us to get in here because of you me honestly uh thanks for building such awesome company we're

going through the similar sort of like Journey you know and we get a lot of funny comments from investors sometime about traction about you know like multiple things which we are doing like can you tell about you know your sort of

that moment which was like super funniest you know where investors like really didn't make sense but you know those the funny moments with the investors would really help us

out I didn't get full question to be honest but can just repeat the question P yeah C it's really hard to hear on the stage for some reason so when you go to investors you know sometimes they don't

fully get the ideas and there's like full funny moments where they ask something which doesn't make any sense you know so did have that kind of moment when you were raising funds you know

just the funny moments with investors so yeah funny moments with investors when you were ra I mean you he he had many I don't know if I'd call them funny but

they were unique moments with investors uh yeah I don't know which one is funny though they didn't there weren't that many things that felt funny it was mostly like I mean actually it's kind of interesting thing is like there's some

investors which I really respect and every time I raise in around I go to them and they reject like got pass on every like the investors I know who have

passed on pass eight times or nine times in two companies so um I think the for us like the I like the thing that I found most

interesting about like you fundraise moments where that each run we raised was very difficult like seed a b c we only had one term sheet right so ESS

which means we probably went to 100 investors in each time and ab andc we only one investor gave us a term Shi so we did not have really the any room for

negotiation negotiating and I I look back at all the complaints they had other the investors all the reasons they had to pass and they were all right like they pretty much like even though you

didn't became successful the reasons they passed were not actually stupid and they were right about it like for example series a like we we were mainly growing use kind of leveraging some

third party channels and investors didn't think that was going to scale so they passed because of that and turn turns out they were right like those channels did not really scale but we found other channels and then series B

we had other issues we were growing fast but some people had were not really happy with our retention rates which they were right like retention was low but then over time as content catalog

became bigger retention got better right so essentially the invest and you release subscriptions subscription essentially the investors who just kind of really evaluated the company based on

the fonders and the the progress you're are making turn out to make like made really good returns people who got stuck on some specific aspect of the business they all they were they turn out right

about that issue but they were wrong that we kind of fix those issues over time right so I think this is like if I'm ever an investor I'm like 90% of my thinking is going to be are these the

founders who can figure out fixed issues because like at any moment like you a bunch of things which are not obvious about your business there's always going to be certain metric which look bad but

as long as you have the pace to be able to fix them it kind of works out that is a really wise moment for all of the

people here the mentors the founders and the investors because at the end of the day as you said every single business

here my business every business is has things that right now are unfund but if you as a Founder can have

the dedication passion and determination to fix them then you'll overcome them right and eventually be an enormous success so uh I I know we're out of time

we're at zero I see I see John giving the hand I mean I could talk forever do do we have time for one more John one more question yeah all right right there in the front uh because you're all the

way from Mongolia uh so that's that's long enough away that we can we we can give you if you're not from Mongolia no

questions no so as at said I am from Mongolia and I just graduate fi uh cohort in Mongolia

in 2023 and I'm here to um like uh I know to to learn about the ecosystem of the

startups here and also I just uh admitted to draer accelerator program so as for me I am trying to uh build a platform where people can communicate

through polling within 24 hours and I'm considering to immigrate to United States as I think like the fing Market

here so as you are as um an immigrant who was immigrant in 2007 how did you actually enter to the United States

Market how did you um attract the customers and of course you had lacking knowledge about the public perception Public Market studies and uh so can you

please uh advise and give a a key takeaway of how to enter US market thank you should she move to the US and then

if so how I I think look the market is a lot more ecosystems are a lot more established right now worldwide than it was in 200 like 10 so in 2010 I think

like moving to us was a massive Advantage I think like now for example I'm from turkey at that time doing this in Turkey would be like just impossible but in the 14 years ceas then

now there are multiple multi-billion dollar businesses started in Turkey right I think like the ecosystem is actually really globalized and even Farm Institute has a has a kind of had a role

in to play in this especially I don't think there was a time where you had to move here you had to be here and that reform is not as as uh strict here and

now it's really like based on the idea if the key customers or early customers you have to reach to are really locally based here you just have to move here I think that that is kind of how but

sometimes like for example if you're building a gaming company like turkey's gaming de game development Market is very established right now so honestly if you're building a social game or mobile gaming company I would actually

say like stay in Turkey like if I was in Turkey right so it's just like I think now this is a little more Nuance which where you have to go because again it's not as like s Val does not have a

monopoly on starting company anymore um and I would say also hon even us markets like there are also like non-slick and valid markets which might be even better fit so when I when we were in silen

Valley the the ecosystem felt out a lot smaller so it felt like you could just go meet most people whereas now there are way too many companies when I look at people who are in Miami or like some

those Los Angeles ecosystem which are like smaller they feel more tighten it it feels like just like if you're a Founder doing interesting things you can actually get to know more people people there versus here this is not like the

way too many companies way too many great entrepreneurs are kind of racing for the same attention so I think again like the where you need to be for your business is like much more nuanced right

now than it was like 15 years ago all right let's give a big round of applause for Aaron Bali