GOOG split in early April to create a third class of shares (Class C) that allows the founders to maintain control the company through their shares (Class B) for the foreseeable future. They had issued so many Class A shares, their 10:1 voting rights were becoming diminished.
Visit rockhealth.com/startups/submit/ and let us know if you have any questions. We host office hours every week or I'm happy to walk you through it via e-mail.
We're a full-service seed fund. Our roots were as an accelerator, but over time, we have realized that we continue to support our portfolio companies long after they "finish" at Rock Health.
Our equity investment model is very similar to the YC/Start Fund relationship. KPCB, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Mayo Clinic fund the companies we select with a $100,000 convertible note, at the same terms of an existing/pending seed round, or on flexible terms up to an uncapped note. We're different from YC in the sense that Rock Health itself takes no equity in the companies. We try to be extremely entrepreneur-friendly, and ultimately, the convertible note is entirely optional. For companies that don't want the note, we write non-dilutive grants up to $20,000.
In terms of whether we help our companies get funding (or not), our companies have raised more than $100M[1] from investors including Collaborative Fund, Felicis, First Round, Floodgate, Founders Collective, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures, NEA, The Social+Capital Partnership, SV Angel, True Ventures, and USVP, just to name a few (for context, our first cohort of companies finished at Rock Health in November 2011).
Of course, researchers/clinicians can get SBIR and/or NSF grants. From my perspective, funding is not the criticsl path problem.
Lack of a ROI focus and accountability for spending at an organizational level at care delivery organizations is the problem.
Consumer apps can sidestep some of the backwards thinking in care delivery, but if you follow the cost drivers systemically, real innovation that moves the cost needle can be as simple as reducing redundant labor costs, or increasing patient self-service at care delivery interfaces. Nothing that can't be done with circa 1996 web technologies.
Unfortunatelty, human/political organizational barriers to such changes protect entrenched interests and prevent game changing innovation.
That said, I am seeing some minimal attention to real change as accountable care/quality metrics become more front and center due to MU2. Let's hope it doesn't degrade into more subsidies for entrenched vendors to maintain the status quo.
We would love to hear more about it. We don't have any sequencing companies, but have multiple hardware and medical device companies in our portfolio. We don't shy from capital-intensive businesses.
Fantastic, we are currently finishing up some of the basic research. After wrapping that up, we will be searching for the funding source/incubator that offers the best fit. I know one of the founders of one of your portfolio companies and have only heard good things.
Malay here from Rock Health—you're absolutely right. We have two close partners in the area (UnitedHealthcare and Mayo both) and come out once or twice a year.
I'd love to connect with the community next time I'm in the Twin Cities. Send me an e-mail (in profile or malay@rockhealth).
You should also get in touch with John Fein [0], who's running the Sprint/Techstars Accelerator [1] in Kansas City. They're doing mobile health, starting (today, as it happens) with ten companies.
Like the Twin Cities, KC has a growing health-tech scene, with Cerner and a slew of new companies. There are also more veterinary biotech companies here than anywhere else in the world, and many of them are looking for ways to bring their technologies into the human-health market.
I was almost positive I had read the idea of Twitter as a protocol before (or something very similar), even though on Twitter[1] pg notes he never published this specific piece despite having written it in 2009. I really appreciated the simplicity of thinking of Twitter that way, and the definition has stuck with me.
In case anyone else wanted to know where they read it, it's under Request for Startups, #3[2].
Paul, curious if your enthusiasm for twitter has waned in light of the direction they have taken since? Obviously it is still an influential platform, but the grand vision we all had doesn't seem to be materializing...
My enthusiasm as a user hasn't waned. I use it increasingly often. But I'm not so enthusiastic about funding companies based on it. There are probably still opportunities for companies to grow by using Twitter initially, but it would be risky to start a company that depended on Twitter.
For medical devices that are based on modern mobile platforms, the average FDA clearance time is down to 67 days. It's not nearly as capital-intensive as it used to be and there are going to be plenty of predicate devices to base your filings on.
The ubiquitous computing plus sensor environment is making healthcare hardware startups the norm—we're seeing more and more applicants in this space at Rock Health. We don't think the FDA process is that onerous, and just published a report outlining the process for entrepreneurs who are new to the space.
If you want to dig into the million SNP raw data from 23andMe any further than what is presented on the website, Jeff Hammerbacher and Konrad Karczewsk taught a Skillshare on doing your own personal genome analysis with Python and various other tools.
If you don't hear from one of our alumni because they happen to miss this thread, feel free to e-mail me (e-mail is in profile) and I would be happy to connect you with someone.
These are some good points. On the EHR question, I think what we would like to see is a company that starts using the work coming out of Standards & Interoperability (S&I)[1]. One can reasonably expect that much of this work will surface in Meaningful Use requirements (since one of the primary objectives of MU is interoperability) and thus would force vendors, including Epic, to comply. The platform here would do the "hard work" of integrating under the S&I frameworks to multiple endpoints and exposing the integration through developer-friendly APIs, similar to what Eligible has done on the administrative side. We see this type of "easy" integration leading to more modularity for EHRs (which is supported by Meaningful Use requirements) and ultimately better end products for hospitals and patients.
Why do you think past efforts haven't "panned out" yet? Is it:
a) they're working on it, but just not there yet
b) the major EHR do everything in their power to delay progress by providing token access
c) it's actually very hard to sync medical records across so many different standards / systems
d) not enough patient / doctor demand / use-cases, i.e. people don't transfer as much as we think they do, diluting the value of inter-operability
? or something else? all of the above?
This area of HIT fascinates me because I hypothesize that it's a necessary precursor to reform. But, knowing little about the space, I'm not sure where to start my investigation.
In San Francisco, Kaiser could electronically share patient data with every other system running Epic with very little technical work and price. We're talking hours of work here. That would let them share data with UCSF, PCMH and every other Epic site.
They don't. Why not? It's because sharing patient data makes it easy to poach patients, and that's bad for business. There are similar situations in other cities too.
I don't blame them because the government hasn't made data exchange required yet. It's coming, with some of the requirements for Meaningful Use Stage 2 & 3 and the work done by the S&I framework. APIs will help too, because HL7 is confusing to newcomers and costs money. Vendors could make this easier too, but it's not like Epic or Cerner could compel anyone to share patient data.
I would think HIPPA is one of the issues here. Federal law says it is a big no no to freely share health info without a raft of signed paperwork, basically.
Typically customers handle this through some type of waiver system. Generally at the initial visit in an organization a patient signs a ton of releases that state that the parent organization allowed to share patient information as needed through the course of treatment. Most people want to share their information, but there are systems in place to restrict access as needed by law/best practices. Patients can opt out of data, and some data sharing systems support this through various technical choke points. If you were a nurse at one organization, you may not want people snooping through your medical records at another medical organization. The Direct Protocol supports this through pseudo-anonymity of accounts.
I worked at an insurance company for five years. Part of my job was to get authorizations so I could request medical records. I had annual hippa training. I was not allowed to read any medical records or request any medical records that were not directly involved in doing my job. One standard of hippa is "minimum necessary." That means I am only entitled to as much information as is absolutely necessary to do the job and not more. So I suspect that some system to share records has serious challenges.
Neither company cares about the comparison.