-Namit Chugh, VC at W Health Ventures.
Team 100X interviewed some of the top investors across the globe about their venture investing journeys, startups, and India.Here,Namit Chugh, VC at W Health Venturesshares his responses.
Q1. What is your motivation to be in venture investing business?
I started my career as a healthcare strategy consultant and worked on private equity diligences for half a decade. Consulting taught me the right frameworks – and I wanted to use my healthcare and finance knowledge to help founders early on. I believe that the next decade will define the road of entrepreneurship in India. And I want to play a pivotal role in changing this landscape.
Q2. Describe your workday and leisure day, how does it look like.
A typical workday involves meeting new founders, talking to existing portfolio founders to understand what support they might need from me or the team – be it hiring, strategy, financial review, inorganic growth opportunity assessment, etc. and team standups to brainstorm/debate on new ideas and companies. Every single deal received or sourced by the team has to be discussed internally and a select few then reach the partner level.
A leisure day is actually a combination of a fun cycling ride and new food experiments – both cooking and eating out.
Q3. What is your view on the future of India as a market?
I am personally super bullish about the Indian entrepreneurial ecosystem, and more so for healthcare – one of the only sectors growing at 20-25% y-o-y. Although, healthcare is complex with multiple stakeholders and difficult to crack, it holds an unmatched potential to better lives- making it all the more exciting and rewarding to build in.
This is the time to build in healthcare in India- propelled by demand-side tailwinds including increased consumer spending on healthcare, improved insurance coverage , greater adoption of digital healthcare solutions and supply-side tailwinds including growth of healthtech startups, adoption of technology by healthcare providers, and government regulatory support.
Q4. Help describe your investment thesis and ideas you would like to back.
At W Health Ventures, we invest in innovative, tech-enabled, healthtech ventures that are providing end-to-end solutions for large whitespaces in healthcare. We are excited about vertically integrated, single-specialty models and have already backed companies across diabetes, mental health, pregnancy, sexual health, chronic pain, weight loss, etc. A key aspect we look for before investing is the startup’s obsession with improving clinical outcomes and experiences for patients- this validates the need for the solution and also drives patient adherence and retention.
I am personally excited to back startups that are omnichannel as today, relying solely on online channels is not sustainable, particularly in healthcare where patients are traditionally used to offline touchpoints. Also, keen on startups building healthcare products and services in India that can be sold globally. We are also very interested in products solving for the huge out-of-pocket expenditure (~50%) in healthcare.
Q5. What are your
Be founder-first
– They are the core of why investors exist. Our goal is to drive value and help them create long term scalable impact.
Be courageous
– As an investor, even after detailed research, many times we have to risk being wrong to back innovative, never-seen-before ideas to enable real impact.
Learn as you go
– Every investor has an ever-hurting anti-portfolio, what we have to do is revaluate decisions, investment processes and get smarter.
Empathize –
Every founder, even those building products that do not fit in your thesis, deserve respect provided through clear communication, timelines and any support.
Q6. Mention a few consumer/industry/technology trends in India and globally.
Emergence of vertically-integrated models –
Patients want the reassurance, convenience and comfort of one-stop-solutions for any health ailment. In the last two years, there have been several start-ups building end-to-end platforms with services and products focused on a single therapy area.
Omnichannel approach
– Startups have begun to realize the importance of physical touch points and thus, partnering with legacy healthcare providers or opening offline centers/clinics.
New healthcare workers
–Healthcare innovation has led to the emergence of a new healthcare workforce comprising health coaches, care concierges, insurance relationship managers and remote paramedics.
Non-patient facing solutions
, is seeing traction among healthcare providers globally.
Q7. Top 5 advice you would give to startup founder.
Build fundamentally strong businesses from the get-go
- Founders should have clear visibility of how to achieve product market economic fit, expand margins and become profitable.
Be patient centric
- To build a product which customers are obsessed with, it is imperative to understand what they want. To keep a pulse on the ground, founders should talk to their customers across different stages of customer cycle.
Chase value, not valuation
- Creating value for all stakeholders especially patients should be core to founders as valuation is an after-effect of this.
Never compromise on business ethics
- Ethical values are the building blocks of every successful organization and are integral to building a solid culture.
Be unapologetically yourself always
- You will find the right partner, be it a supplier, leadership team member, investor, sooner or later.
Q8. How do you support your portfolio companies?
Business insights and research
- Through mine and the entire team’s immense experience across healthcare companies and our visibility of the entire industry, we are able to provide startups with insights that help build new and improve existing products and services. We have a significant numbers of doctors in our team and advisory panel who are instrumental in strengthening clinical models.
Bring global learnings to India – We invest in the US as well; our goal is to learn from global successes, contextualize and help our portfolio companies bring those products and services to India
Strategic partnerships
- For healthcare startups, partnering with traditional healthcare providers is key to growing operations but often difficult. With our existing network, we are able to cultivate these relationships
Hiring
- Helping find and evaluate applicants for key hires in the company
Q9. Which of your portfolio company you are very excited about and why?
It’s hard for a parent to select a favorite child, but for sake of this question- Mylo. Right from the first call with the founder Vinit, I was massively impressed with how quickly and efficiently Mylo built a hyper-engaged community of parents and created processes enabling high user obsession. The users’ trust on the Mylo brand is passed on to their high-quality mother and baby care products and services developed from user data and insights. What Vinit and team Mylo have built is incredible- no other community in India has been so successful with engagement and monetization. I also had the privilege of interacting with mothers using Mylo and was blown away with the impact Mylo has had on them. One lady expressed how Mylo alleviated her anxiety- at 2 am, when she would wake up stressed with some question regarding her baby and was uncomfortable waking up family members, Mylo became an outlet where she could post her questions and get answers within minutes.
Q10. When you started your career what were your ambitions?
I always wanted to do something that can affect lives positively and make a meaningful impact.
And I experimented with my career early on to finally decide on the kind of work that I wanted to do. Despite starting as a techie, I moved quickly to finance and then to financing in healthcare – which is what I enjoy the most.
Q11. What inspires you in life and what keeps you awake at night?
Mostly, cross-time zone meetings keep me awake given we are a US-India fund!
What keeps me motivated to wake up every day excited for office is the realization that each of my tasks plays a small role in meaningfully improving the health of millions of Indians.
Q12. Books or Blogs you would like to recommend entrepreneurs.
Intended consequences by Hemant Taneja
of General Catalyst, founders should read this to works towards responsible innovation and use of technology for greater good.
Build
is a bookby Tony Fadell or as he has titled it, an unorthodox guide to making things worth making. Tony Fadell is most-well known as the creator of the iPod and iPhone; his journey as a founder and engineer across leading tech giants and startups is incredible advice for entrepreneurs and creators today.
