Welcome to SPEED. This episode on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Welcome to SPEED, a show about leaders who move fast. We interview founders working on solving the world’s biggest problems — think malnutrition, climate change, or cancer. This work requires urgency — every step forward might mean another life saved. Our guests understand this and apply their best strategies to move insanely fast and bring their products to the people.
Hear their stories and learn their ways.
Episode #1: Deepika Bodapati of Athelas
Deepika and her cofounder Tanay started in 2016, college dropouts wanting to bring cheap blood tests to everyone. They’ve helped more than 150,000 patients and built a $1.5B company.
Fifty Years backed Athelas in 2016, and we are so proud of the impact Tanay and Deepika are having.
Here are Athelas’s 3 secrets to moving insanely fast:
1. Acting fast on customer feedback
The original Athelas product was a blood testing device that measured complete blood count. This saved patients 5+ hours a week, but the initial market was fairly small: just 100k patients on a specific drug.
This evolved 3 times:
Doctors mentioned needing monitoring for other metrics. Knowing whether a psychiatric patient is taking a drug ensures doctors can make informed decisions, saving lives. And knowing other vitals like blood pressure and weight can help manage comorbidities remotely.
So Athelas built a whole monitoring system!
Doctors complained about managing those billing codes for remote monitoring. The US healthcare system has providers wanting to charge more and payers (ie insurance companies) wanting to pay less. The referees are billers, intermediaries who pass claims back and forth to resolve disagreements. But billers are often amateurs. One doctor using Athelas was so unhappy with his biller, he fired the biller and asked Athelas to manage all his billing.
So Athelas created a billing product!
Then Athelas realized billing code management is an extremely manual task. You have to call insurance companies, request endless forms, and look up lots of data.
So they’re automating it!
Each of these new products opened a 10x bigger market, resulting in larger contracts and faster sales cycles.
Their original product had a sales cycle of 12 months.
Their most recent product can be sold to the same size of organization in eight days.
2. Purpose
Athelas is able to hire team members from top companies like Apple, Tesla, and Meta, and folks who have graduated from top schools.
In Silicon Valley, talented people have 20+ choices of companies with Athelas’s size and growth. But many of those places lack purpose.
Athelas's first product helped screen for cancer by counting white blood cells. Their RPM products helped patients with chronic conditions stay healthy. And their billing product is enabling doctors to focus more on their patients, and worry less about financial gotchas.
Everyone in America is impacted by this, often at the most vulnerable and challenging moments of their lives. At Athelas, you get to help millions of people avoid that pain.
Long term, Athelas’s tools will reduce total healthcare spend via better outcomes and lower admin costs.
3. Radical Accountability and Hard Work
The Athelas leadership hires for an attitude of ownership, and team members are extremely focused on OKRs. Every weekend, the leadership team reviews OKRs with team leads in sessions that sometimes extend for hours. (For more on setting OKRs, go here)
When a lead notes being behind on a goal, their teammates talk through the lead’s processes. They go through the lead’s workflows, and figure out how to speed things up or unblock them.
Issues are noticed early, and lots of creative brainpower is put into solving them.
Join Athelas!
Find out more about Athelas and open roles at Athelas.com.
If you or a friend are starting a company in climate, health, education, or another important problem area, reach out! We’d love to help you realize your vision for improving the world. Consider this a warm intro.
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