Virgílio Bento, Co-founder and CEO of Sword Health, shares exclusive insights into the company's fundraising journey and attracting top talent. He discusses the importance of thinking from first principles in the healthcare industry and their transition to becoming a provider. He recounts the surprising journey to securing funding and the impact of COVID-19 on their team setup. Bento emphasizes the significance of access to talent in accelerating growth and the continuous optimization of their solutions.
The value of a solution lies in its ability to advance knowledge within a field, rather than market value or client relevance.
Hiring a talent officer is crucial for accessing talent and addressing bottlenecks in team building, beyond focusing on commercial or financial roles.
Deep dives
The Importance of Advancing Existing Knowledge
The speaker emphasizes that the value of a solution is not determined by its market value or its relevance to clients, but rather by its ability to advance existing knowledge in a field.
Overcoming Challenges and Accessing Talent
The speaker shares their experience of building their team, highlighting the importance of hiring a talent officer to address the bottleneck of accessing talent instead of focusing solely on commercial or financial roles.
Navigating Funding and Development
The speaker discusses the challenges and strategies they employed to secure funding for their technology development, including obtaining research grants and attracting investments at various stages.
From External to Internal Clinical Teams
The speaker explains their shift in strategy, transitioning from providing external clinical teams with their technology to becoming a provider themselves, which allowed them to have a greater impact in the healthcare industry.
In this podcast, Kyriakos discussed with the CEO and founder of Sword Health, one of the fastest growing companies in healthcare, with a $2b valuation.
Virgilio gave us exclusive insights into the company's incredible track record of raising funds from some of the most powerful venture capital firms such as Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, and General Catalyst.
He also discusses why he believe attracting the best talent is more important for a startup than anything else, and the importance of thinking from first principles as an outsider in the healthcare industry.
Website ► https://swordhealth.com/
LinkedIn ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/swor...
Twitter ► @SwordHealth
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00:48 - Intro
03:51 - Raising the initial funds
05:13 - How their products changed over the years
07:53 - Introduction to Khosla Ventures
10:03 - The first product that went to the market
13:53 - The moment they found a product-market fit
15:03 - Series A journey - cold emailing Vinod Khosla
21:03 - What he wrote in his cold email to Khosla Ventures
22:02 - First hire in the US - Chief Talent Officer
24:12 - The power of VCs and how they feed you talent
26:01 - Philosophy on hiring
30:20 - How to find the unique candidates in an interview
33:26 - Training people to become managers
34:44 - Going from $2M to $100M
40:08 - Listening to your users and customers
45:17 - Thinking from first principles and being an outsider
47:39 - Key learnings from the best investors in the world
50:39 - What we should expect from Sword in the future
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