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TRANSCRIPT:
DOUG: If you’re having trouble figuring out what you’re doing tomorrow, imagine our next guest who’s with Health2047 and is really looking ahead. Claire, thanks for being with us and can you give us a brief overview of what Health2047 is about?
CLAIRE: Sure, thanks for having me. Health2047 is the venture studio of the American Medical Association. We build and back early-stage healthcare companies. So, how I like to describe our model as a studio is we’re not just an investment fund that’s writing checks, but we also kind of operate with an agency model. We provide professional services, in my case, marketing and communications to our portfolio companies. So, the startups that we invest in as part of our overall value proposition in working with them and our startups range from an obesity phenotyping company to a foundation model, helping radiologists, as well as a Medicare advantage plan that was founded by physicians. My role is split 50/50 between supporting the firm’s brand as well as supporting all of these companies.
DOUG: As the owner of a 40-year-old startup myself. I know that a startup mentality is so important. How do you bring that to any organization?
CLAIRE: Yes, you really can. One of the things that I see a lot is, and I really appreciate what the founders that I work with is, that they make a point, even as they scale, to stay very close to the customer. If you think about how a company grows as a company scales, often the layers between the person who’s making the decision and the person that’s being decided for. In some cases, employees, in a lot of cases, customers become wider. There becomes a lot more layers. So, what I’ve seen is there are late-stage founders that still make it intentional, that they join sales calls and they join calls with their customers. And I think that’s really important takeaway for all organizations is staying as close to the customer as possible. That might look like if you’re a marketer at a large enterprise, actually joining and listening in on a voice of the customer call, for example.
DOUG: Yeah. So, that’s so interesting because a lot of founders are told you’ve got to delegate, delegate, delegate. And it’s reassuring to hear from you because I was on a call with a potential new customer just before this conversation. So, that’s good, but a topic that’s important is how do these organizations stand out to venture capitalists? Are there any tips along the way?
CLAIRE: Yeah. So, one of the things we look at is really who the founder is. So, building your brand can be very important in that respect as it is in any career. So, if you think about a company, take the finances aside. If you talk to any VC, they’ll mention things like they’re looking for coachability in a founder. They’re looking for team chemistry. They’re looking for domain expertise. And if you really peel back all of those layers, it actually comes down to storytelling. Now, Christina Farr, who’s an investor and a former healthcare journalist, has a really good book on this topic. So, I won’t steal too many of her punchlines here, but it’s called The Storyteller’s Advantage, and it’s all about really peeling back what makes a good story. So, something that comm pro’s do day in and day out. If you think about coachability, for example, that’s really taking feedback that you received from your investor on your initial pitch check and making sure it’s clear in your subsequent narrative that you’ve taken that feedback. It’s about the mythology you create around how your team is uniquely positioned to solve the challenge at hand.
DOUG: Yeah, and you’ve obviously learned a lot from advising founders. What are some of those lessons?
CLAIRE: As a marketer at heart, I love to do a bit of segmentation. So, I’m going to start with some of the blind spots that I help founders identify. So, a few different types of founders I work with, one, technical founders. So as a technical founder, you’re often really in love with your solution. It’s your baby and maybe a little bit less in love with the problem of your customer that it’s actually trying to solve. So, I often coach these founders is that product market fit can sometimes be a blind spot if you’re overly focused on your solution. Clinical founders who I work with a lot, physician founders, etc. we’re part of the American Medical Association, the customer’s problem is often the core and founding principle of what they’re doing. So, they are steeped in the customer’s problem. They’re often still seeing patients with that problem, but when it comes to actually scaling to other markets. That can sometimes be the blind spot. And then we work a lot with repeat founders, which is fantastic because they’re excellent at pattern recognition, but it’s really important not to always rely on the same playbook over and over again. So, that’s something that I advise founders on as well from a very tactical standpoint as well. One lesson I’ve had to unleash, so to speak, to founders, is treating a press release like a pitch deck. So, as we know, Doug, a press release and a press announcement, it’s multiple bites of the apple, whereas a pitch meeting, if you’re lucky, you’ll get 30 minutes with an investor to pitch your entire company an idea. So, really actually taking that drip campaign approach is something very new and exciting for founders. And that’s where my role comes in.
DOUG: What are the most effective ways to help employees feel invested in the organization’s future?
CLAIRE: At the early stage, some of the founding companies that I work with, they might be 10 or 15 people. That’s a little bit easier, but when you look at companies as they start to scale. So, I was working a few years ago with a series A company, so they had about 50 employees spread across the globe, all really communicating with each other asynchronously in Slack and the company had a major announcement. The founder was anticipating questions. He himself was in a different time zone than many of his employees. So, what we ended up doing was we recorded a series of asynchronous loom videos for employees who weren’t actually in the same time zone. So, a town hall in person wouldn’t have made as much sense. We also, within Slack had an ask Me Anything or AMA thread. And, you know, what we found was that it gave employees a chance to get ahead of the story, and also share the story from a sense of genuine excitement.
DOUG: What is the role that AI is playing in all of this? And maybe we can keep it on the marketing of these founder led companies that are looking to scale.
CLAIRE: I’m actually going to recommend a second book to you. It is The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow. It just came out. So, he’s a technologist that he’s also a sci fi writer, and his theory is really interesting. So, if you think about how we should be using AI as marketers and professionals, think about the centaur. You have the human head that is doing the thinking, and then you have the powerful machine, the horse’s body. It’s a weird image I know of AI that really propels you forward. If you take the opposite of that. You know the reverse centaur, which is going to make the imagery even stranger. It’s really thinking about the horse’s head. So, AI that is being propelled forward by the human. So, a lot of the ways that the AI industry is automating away labor and what that can look like, and it’s not very effective, can be things like using AI to generate your content whole cloth. And I think a lot of folks are under pressure with AEO to optimize their content and really churn out a lot of content that LLMs can read, but you end up with automation decay as the content is read by LLMs and was created by the LLMs, and frankly, LLMs can recognize the content that was generated by them as well.
DOUG: If you want to wrap up with a final thought to the conversation, that would be great, because if people gotten through to this point, they will have learned a lot.
CLAIRE: One thing that can be learned really well from the industry that I work in is actually some of the constraints that we have and some of the restraints that we have. So, one of the things that I’m always impressed with, with my colleagues who work at startups, is they don’t have a prescribed tech stack, and so they’re able to be really creative and flexible in how they use tools. One of them just recommended a great course for me called Claude for marketers, for example, which is all about how do you unlock these tools to really amplify your marketing production. So, that’s something that I think is often overlooked in how we look at the scrappy Silicon Valley mentality, and is an important takeaway.
DOUG: Well, you’ve had so many important takeaways. Thanks so much for being on the podcast.
CLAIRE: Thank you for having me.
