Defining the Moonshot Startup Plan with Jamey Edwards

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with Jamie Edwards. Jamie is the Chief Platform Officer and Entrepreneur in Residence for Startup Health, which was founded in 2011 to invest in a global army of entrepreneurs called Health Transformers, who are committed to achieving health moonshots. Jamie, welcome to The Daily Bolster.

Jamie Edwards: Matt, great to be here, and great job on that introduction.

Matt Blumberg: Well, thank you. It's like you wrote it.

Jamie Edwards: It's kind of like that.

Matt Blumberg: So the thing I love about the way you all describe your firm is the use of the word moonshot. So I wanted to key in on that for our conversation today. So let me start by asking you, how do you define what a moonshot is relative to any other sort of growth startup plan that you see?

Jamie Edwards: Yeah, so for us, a moonshot has to have some key characteristics. One is, it's got to be that big, hairy, audacious goal. It's not just, I want to impact cancer, it's I want to cure cancer. And I think there's a few other characteristics that go into creating a moonshot. Another one is that it's highly collaborative. If you take a look at what it took to get to the moon, it wasn't just NASA doing this on its own, but it was thousands of thousands people coming together from different organizations over many years to achieve that goal. And the same is true when we take a look at our startup companies. We feel like it really takes a village to create the change that we want. And the third main piece of this is, what's the huge impact it's going to have at that point of care? Or on the lives of however many millions or billions of peoples you want to impact. Those are really the key things that we look at, and it takes a real transformational founder to pull that off. We're not looking for incremental change, we're looking for exponential change.

Matt Blumberg: And so, why? How did your firm land on that? Presumably there's plenty of money to be made and investing in healthcare startups that do incremental change, because the scope of the problem is so huge that incremental change can be positive, both economically and for society.

Jamie Edwards: Yeah, I think for us it was about being able to think big, to take that next big leap forward. Going to the moon was that a couple decades ago, and now you've got Elon Musk talking about going to Mars. What's that next leap that it's really going to take to change the way that we think about solving the challenges that face our healthcare system? And incremental change, not bagging on it, absolutely critical, important that we do it. But when we talk about the founders that we really want to be working with at Startup Health, they're the ones who are crafting a new future, and are thinking big enough that they can see beyond the obstacles that are in front of them. And so when we train entrepreneurs to be part of our program here at Startup Health, these founders have key things that some other founders may not have. They have a transformational mindset. We spend a lot of time at making sure that they understand that their mission isn't a three- to- five year mission, but a 25- year mission. And they're in this to really, at the end of the day, affect that change that we were talking about before. At the point of care and on large populations.

Matt Blumberg: All those things fit together, right? Audacious, significant impact, exponential, and 25 year. Which is interesting. And I guess that gets me to my last question, which is, as you think broadly about the world, and the world of startups, are there other sectors where sort of the moonshot approach makes sense? Healthcare, you can clearly see it, right? Solving cancer is not a short- term problem. But are there other sectors where you think the approach would also work? Or do you know of any other investors that have the same moonshot approach in other sectors?

Jamie Edwards: Well, I don't want to point to Elon Musk as a model for everything, because clearly there's some things he does that are controversial. But if you take a look at somebody who has gone and attacked very entrenched sectors, which healthcare is, from finance to space to automotive, these are sectors where change was slow because there were a huge number of large incumbents, and it took someone from the outside to come in and ruffle feathers. And I think that's the same thing that we're looking for in healthcare. You're talking about an industry map that's$ 4. 3 trillion of GDP. So 20% of US GDP. The global spend on healthcare is around 10 billion. And the US is 4.3 amid 10 trillion. And the US is 4. 3 trillion of that. So when you take a look at those numbers, it's kind of staggering. And you take a look at where the United States is in particular in World Health Organization results, and we rank behind some third world countries in terms of the quality of our healthcare system. So we do not have equal access to high quality care in this country. And it takes big moonshot thinking, and people willing to take a leap to capture the imagination of an industry and move it forward. So I think space was a great example, financial service is another one. But healthcare, to me, is prime for this moonshot model. Due to the fact it has typically a risk- averse culture, a large number of incumbents, a large number of revenue on one, and organizations have biology. They all want to survive. And what we're looking for is not to keep organizations alive, but to really change the face of healthcare, and to do that by believing in the founders who can do it.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, I'd have to think climate is another area where...

Jamie Edwards: Huge.

Matt Blumberg: It's kind of a weird one because it's not necessarily... A scope of the problem is huge, it's not necessarily a massive industry depending on how you define the industry there. But it's one where you have to be audacious, you have to be exponential.

Jamie Edwards: I couldn't agree with that more, Matt. And climate is an interesting one because, as you just pointed out, is it's not an industry in and of itself. You have the energy industry that makes it up. The automotive industry that makes it up. I mean, there's a lot of different components to what it's going to take to attack something like climate change. And if you look at models like the XPRIZE as an example, they're looking to take on those types of challenges too. I think climate would be a perfect place for a moonshot focus.

Matt Blumberg: All right. Jamie Edwards from Startup Health, thank you so much for joining me.

Jamie Edwards: Matt, thanks for hosting this very important dialogue. And I wish we had an hour, but I'll take five minutes.