From Investment Banking to Healthcare Tech: PocketHealth’s Blueprint for Industry Outsiders

The conventional wisdom says you need deep industry expertise to disrupt healthcare. But what if being an outsider is actually your greatest advantage?

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, PocketHealth Co-Founder and CEO Rishi Nayyar shared how his investment banking background, combined with his brother’s engineering expertise, helped them see opportunities that industry veterans missed.

“Even as went through, I went through my banking experience, I felt that this wasn’t necessarily the career I was going to be in long term,” Rishi explained. “But it was a really good place to learn the fundamentals of how the corporate world worked, how to advocate, communicate in a professional way, and also save up money for many years of no income.”

This outsider perspective shaped their approach in three crucial ways:

1. Simplifying the Complex Where healthcare veterans saw necessary complexity, they saw unnecessary friction. “It’s healthcare. Yeah, it’s complicated and messy, but it’s just file sharing,” Rishi noted. This mindset helped them cut through to the core problem.
2. Setting a Higher Bar Instead of benchmarking against other healthcare solutions, they looked to consumer tech. As Rishi explained, “Our bias is how are these problems solved in the entirety of tech, in the entirety of consumer applications, not, hey, what are other patient portals that we can look at.”
3. Building for Scale Their banking background gave them a clear view of what scale could look like. They felt that “between the two of us, myself with a business background, I’ve always felt that sales marketing came naturally. And him being an extremely talented engineer, we felt that we could build something together without a lot of funding or prerequisites to get something off the ground.”

But being an outsider also meant they needed a different playbook. Here’s how they approached it:

First, they started local to build credibility. “Starting locally in the Toronto area was really important for us to get that early feedback, early revenue, and be able to get to the point where we felt we had a product that was heavily chipped away and refined not by us, but by the market,” Rishi shared.

Second, they focused on universal patient needs rather than getting caught up in healthcare system complexity. “Our core customer is a patient, and we find that patients are very similar from one region to another,” Rishi noted. “There’s high anxiety before an exam. They want to know how to prepare.”

Third, they positioned their outsider status as an advantage in sales conversations. By bringing consumer tech standards to healthcare, they could offer something incumbents couldn’t match.

The results speak for themselves. Today, PocketHealth serves over 700 hospitals and imaging centers across North America, with more than a million patients on the platform. “2023 looks like it’s going to match previous years in terms of our growth rate, which is we’re growing multiples every year,” Rishi shared.

For founders contemplating entering a regulated industry, PocketHealth’s journey offers several key lessons:

1. Use your outsider perspective to question industry assumptions
2. Start local to build credibility before scaling
3. Focus on universal user needs that transcend industry complexity
4. Bring higher standards from adjacent industries
5. Build for scale from day one

Their story challenges the notion that industry expertise is a prerequisite for success. Sometimes the fresh perspective of an outsider is exactly what an industry needs to move forward.