Amar Kendale On Raising $70 Million To Deliver Healthcare For Rural America

Amar Kendale has already raised $70M for his latest venture. A healthtech startup focusing on a sizable, yet underserved niche, with big potential for impact. His startup, Homeward, has attracted funding from top-tier investors like General Catalyst, ARCH Venture Partners, Human Capital, Glen Tullman, and Lee Shapiro

In this episode, you will learn:

• The changing capital markets and its impact on startups
• How Homeward is changing healthcare
• Having the grit to keep persevering, and the wisdom to know when to quit
• The future of medicine

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About Amar Kendale:

Amar is passionate about developing products and technology that can shape the future of health and wellness, and improve lives.

For over a decade, he has been responsible for bringing into focus the needs of stakeholders- patients, providers, manufacturers, and payers- to drive the development and commercialization of a wide range of therapeutic and diagnostic products. At Livongo Health, Amar coordinates the company’s product management and design activities.

Prior to joining Livongo, Amar held a variety of strategy, market development, product management, and marketing roles in high-growth companies.

Most recently, at MC10, he defined and validated opportunities for new stretchable, wearable electronics products and platforms, with diverse applications in consumer and healthcare markets ranging from sports impact indicators to neurological disease monitoring.

Earlier in his career, Amar developed medical devices and pharmaceutical products with high-powered teams that included serial innovators Bob Langer, George Whitesides, and Al Chin.

His work has spanned bioabsorbable cardiovascular stents, cardiac surgery tools for intrathoracic visualization, hemostatic drug delivery foams, and implantable devices to treat obesity and diabetes.

Amar completed his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and holds 8 patents.

Connect with Amar Kendale:

• Crunchbase
• LinkedIn
• Bloomberg
• TheOrg

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: Righty hello everyone and welcome to the deal maker show. So today. We have a really interesting founder joining us. You know we have a founder that you know he’s going to be telling us about what he’s doing with his rocket ship now with his company. You know he’s a founder that has experienced everything you know being incorporat being. You know part of acquisitions being part of taking companies public and obviously you know what he’s doing now is say it’s pretty interesting too. So I guess let’s welcome our guest today. Ah let’s take it from there so without further ado. Let’s welcome Amar Kendala welcome to the show.

Amar Kendale: Thank you El Hondra So great to be here.

Alejandro Cremades: So originally you were born in New York but the child of immigrantparents you know I’m sure that that was quite inspiring to see them. You know, really working hard to give you guys a better life. So how was life growing up, give us a little of a walkthrough memory lane.

Amar Kendale: Absolutely yeah I grew up in a suburb of New York city ah with my parents who immigrated here from India in the in the late sixty s early 70 s and my my father was an executive with an engineering background in um, in a multinational. And I used to go with him to work to his office in in Fortley New Jersey and um, you know was really inspired by the kind of work he was doing. He told me he was an engineer you know it wasn’t till years later I found out that he was the head of sales and marketing at that company. But. Ah, what really stuck with me was the fact that that you know as an engineer you could have so much impact you could work on really big problems and um and so that’s what got me started I think I clung to that idea of being an engineer just like my dad you know all the way through college and ultimately graduated from mit with my mechanical engineering degree.

Alejandro Cremades: So then so then let’s talk about that so you go into mit you know you do engineering you know the community there you know was saying quite inspiring to you I mean the people that you met and and also the network that you built which would serve you. You know, really nicely down the line. So how was that the case that.

Amar Kendale: Yeah, it’s it’s true and ah you know I was at mit in in the late 90 s and the early two thousand s which of course is you know during the dotcom boom and so it was a great place to be as as technology was exploding a lot of my classmates were. Ah, in computer science or heading into computer science attracted to you know this this huge wave of innovation that was coming I took a little bit of a contrarian perspective. You know one being in the mechanical engineering discipline. You know it forced me instantly to think about other things and work on other kinds of problems but it also allowed me to meet very different kinds of people. And so while I was at mit I spent a lot of time at the sloan school taking classes as the business school there and fell in with a group of ah, very diverse entrepreneurs Carmichael Roberts being one of them. Ah, who was was doing his Mba after his postdoc at Harvard. Ah and was also in the process of starting a new life science company. Ah, he was spinning it out from harvard with a professor named George Whitesides one of the the most eminent professors in in the field of chemistry and I was drawn in to this idea that um you know, even though. Ah I as an engineer had a very different background I could work with with scientists you know chemists biologists and others. To do something really impactful in the life sciences. So it really opened up ah an entirely new facet and domain for me, you know while a lot of my my peers were headed off into dot com.

Alejandro Cremades: So you you definitely you know, headed off into the engineering side of things you know because that’s essentially what you did with surface logics. So so in this case, you know like what was what what was like that first you know entering the. You know, professional you know market and and and obviously that company ended up getting acquired but but how was that for you. So.

Amar Kendale: Yeah, it. It was ah it was a life changinging experience and um and part of you know the lessons I could take away in in those early years of my career were around ah working with ah intellectually rigorous team of of. Very cross-disciplinary people. So at this company I mentioned we have chemists we had biologists we had engineers like myself. Um, we had material scientists. We had business people and ah many had come from various academic postings and so the level of rigor the level of. Of of kind of intellectual horsepower is extremely high. Um, we’re working on meaningful problems in the life sciences focused initially on drug discovery and later on drug development and um and probably the most important lessons I took away were that really hard problems often require. Sort of very first principles approach. You know, almost scientific approach even to business problems and I think that’s gone on to serve me really well in subsequent chapters of my career. The other thing I’ve really come to appreciate and learned at surface logics was that this this diversity of thought you know having this kind of really broad group of people working together on a common problem. Ah had enormous power and you know, especially in a world where where the tendency is to silo and focus on a particular discipline or a particular area. Ah that cross-functional teams you know can actually innovate across the boundaries and that’s ended up being another theme throughout my career.

Alejandro Cremades: So How do you?? How do you pass from you know, just like being just focused on the engineering side of it to all of a sudden you know like you kind of like are open to the idea of of figuring you know other aspects of the business you know, marketing and. And other areas of getting closer to the customer. You know like how is that transition for you? yeah.

Amar Kendale: Yeah, so you know I was that I was that annoying engineer who just couldn’t stop asking why and so you know ah I think very often engineers get sort of typecast you know into this idea that they’re told what to do and then they go build it and you know that all their. Creativity is is sort of channeled towards the the solution. You know the how to go build the solution but I was very intrigued by this question of why were we building what we were building and ah you know had we really understood. We really understand the problem well enough to be building the right thing in the first place. And I think that that curiosity. Um you know one the the company you know, indulged me and they they answered my questions you know so I could I could connect with the founders I could connect with the leadership the investors, the Ceo and learn you know and and understand why the decisions were being made that we were. We were making around. Which products to build and which customers to call on so that spark was lit and it was something that I took with me into my into my next experience I went to guident which is a fortune 50 medical device company. In order to in order to really accelerate the pace of of product delivery you know going from sort of a 10 year product cycle which you often experience in life sciences to a a 2 or 3 year product cycle in medical devices that was very exciting to me and there I was in a position where I could work directly with the customer. So.

Amar Kendale: Ah, much of my time was spent in the operating room directly with Cardiac surgeons watching them do procedures and seeing not only ah what they were doing and hearing what they said but really understanding what was missing and I think that’s become a really important skill for me as Well. Which is it’s so often the case. It’s not what your customers tell you that they want but really more what they don’t say and where they’re you know, avoiding pitfalls or avoiding challenging areas simply because they they haven’t yet articulated a problem and and if if we can find that problem for them and define it in a way that we can then solve it. You know there’s something really unique to offer.

Alejandro Cremades: Now 1 thing that is very interesting here is that you ended up moving to arsenal medical which was the immediate step for you to come you know and and and and move to to California so how was that thought process of all of a sudden you landing in California. So.

Amar Kendale: Well, it was actually guided that brought me to California and and and that was very much around experiencing a different work culture and and business culture. You know, um where I started out in Boston you know often has very heavy academic leanings in the businesses that get started and and the pedigree. The people who start them. Ah, silicon valley of course has this this ah different kind of innovators culture. You know as much about learning by doing and so my mentor um who took me under his wing in California al chin had sold his company to guide it. But it continued to innovate in that same style of very much being a a player coach and spending. Every Friday himself in the lab ah building new devices. So you know I think what? what he inculcated me is that west coast style of innovation which is build a prototype every week. It doesn’t matter that we’re in medical device as an industry that doesn’t mean that we need we need to move slowly. We can find places to to work quickly and innovate quickly. Um. I went back to Boston in part to to build a family and so having family in the northeast. It was. It was a good reason to go back. The other reason it was it was opportunistic and timely was I could reconnect with the same group of entrepreneurs that were at surface logics so George Whitesides Carmichael Roberts this time adding ah to the trio Bob Langer Professor at mit you know the father of of tissue engineering and drug delivery in many other fields. Um, really took on their next mission which was to say how can we use novel materials in order to create new medical devices. So here was this opportunity to work with a group I’d worked with.

Amar Kendale: And now parlay this skillset and this experience that I’d built in medical devices of guidance and bring it to this new startup. So really kind of merge those things the momentum I’d built with this team I’d worked with before and the experience I could capitalize on from having done some of this work myself directly.

Alejandro Cremades: So how do you go from there to all of a sudden you know, like thinking that maybe you want to lounge something of your own.

Amar Kendale: Well, ah, there was 1 step along the way. But but before launching on my own and that was um, that was that I I did feel strongly that I wanted to move towards faster and faster product cycles. So you know I mentioned drug discovery and and biotech can be a 5 to 10 year really a 10 years product cycle medical devices if you’re on the fast edge of it. It’s 2 to 3 years um I met a group of entrepreneurs starting a new company called Lavongo that was focused on on software as being really the sort of pacing variable. You know the the time constant for for new things. And um, and that was very appealing to me this was ah this was ah a place where there was a big focus on the consumer experience and the ways we could use software to enable that consumer experience couple it with medical devices so we could be sure that we were doing things that were clinically sound. And robust and we’re going to be accurate when it came to people’s own health. Ah and um and I met lovogo and just after ah, they’d raised their series a of financing I was introduced to them by ah their their investor haut tennasia who’s now leading the firm general catalyst and hamut. Um. You know, ask me to to meet the team and and see if there was ah something interesting that we could. We could do together coupling my experience in medical devices with with what what they’re aiming to do which was build a great new consumer experience and so um, so I joined them in 2 14 to lead business development.

Amar Kendale: Again with it this idea that I wanted to be close to the customer and learn from the best. So my mentors there were the ceo Glenn Tualman and a member of their board Lee Shapiro both of whom had together built the company all scripts over the course of the prior decade. All script is a company where where m and a was a very key element to their success and and doing great partnerships was key their success so I had the opportunity my first year and a half at lavango building a lot of our foundational partnerships particularly channel partnerships across our our big 3 channels reaching employers providers and. And being able to access the influencers. The benefits consultants who help them make those decisions.

Alejandro Cremades: So then I want to hear you know like what happened to with the company that that you try to launch and you know all of a sudden you guys got stuck on the series day you know that that actually happened before Levango. So so why? why don’t we Why don’t we talk about.

Amar Kendale: Um, oh yes, Yes, yes, it did it did it did.

Alejandro Cremades: Dismisses that you know all of a sudden you know like you get excited about launching your own thing and then all of a sudden you guys get stuck on. Seriously.

Amar Kendale: Yeah, okay, okay, great. Sorry aandra j as is that so the company I was ah got very excited about was one I I was looking to to work on again with with my former mentor Al Chin um who had been a founder of origin med systems and he and ah one of his close colleagues. Mike Glenon ah had built an incubator and al having left guide in at that point was innovating at the same rapid pace that he had been at guidancen. So every week new prototype and al had invented a novel mechanism for addressing. Ah. Ah, critical pathway in obesity and in metabolic dysfunction and it was a very novel technology ah and very creative in its deployment. Um, and so Mike and al brought me in to spin this technology out and build a company around it. So i.

Amar Kendale: I was I was up for the challenge. It was my first opportunity to to run a company and so my first job of course was was raising money and assembling a team. Um, but the raising money actually proved to be ah, really challenging. You know we we built I think ah ah, a very compelling business case for for the size of the problem when it comes to metabolic disease and. And the impact it has on society. We demonstrated some very compelling data around a proof of concept using this innovative technology that all had developed and and yet. Ah, as as we were working our way through the fundraising process. The largest company in obesity space shut its doors. So this is a company called satiety and they went out of business. They’d raised something like $100,000,000 and it was ah it it basically cast a pall over the whole space. You know all the funding in that obesity intervention space dried up almost overnight and so um.

Alejandro Cremades: M.

Amar Kendale: You know this was a very difficult time in my career. Probably the most difficult time you know we’re after spending six months pounding the pavement and ah you know, just beginning to feel like I was making some traction you know for essentially the the market to to cool off. Um, was was quite a blow. Um, ah but. But yet you know I I think I think back to the the sort of under underlying skills and that I developed over the period of time I think that’s probably where I really developed the resilience. Ah as a salesperson ah to to not accept. No. Ah, as as a final answer you know to to maintain that kind of persistence and to not give up. Um, ah you know, long long past perhaps long past. Ah you know the the time a normal person might might concede concede defeat. Um, ultimately though you know it did it did make sense to to call it.

Alejandro Cremades: How how do how do you get to that point to call it because I mean that say it takes it takes something you know to to get to that point.

Amar Kendale: And and and we decided to.

Amar Kendale: Yeah, yeah, I think that um I think that I had knocked on every door is is really the answer Alejandro I you know I think I’d I’d worked a a pretty extensive network that I had and that my cofounders had. Ah, in terms of accessing, accessing capital considering the ways we might might pivot or reorient I think you know the um I think the hard truth there also that I really came to appreciate was that um, especially especially when the market chills in a space that. It’s it’s not easy to to it doesn’t thaw overnight you know, no matter how compelling an idea is that the the nature of the sort of time cycles for investment in a given space are longer than an entrepreneur’s lifecycle and there’s that mismatch you know oftentimes where um. Opportunity costs of continue to push something forward when there’s no clarity as to when the window might open the opportunity cost starts to rise and I think that’s really what I perceived was that um that as an you know, continue to push on this you know while while I believed in the idea and and its potential. Um. That the window there was no line of sight to when the window would open again.

Alejandro Cremades: Now Obviously you know I always call it you either succeed or you learn so incredible learnings here now in your case you were talking about it. I mean you eventually you know land in Leongo and that was you know a fun phenomenal journey where the company went public and then the company ended up getting acquired. What kind of disability. Do You think that gave you into into success into success when it comes to you know a hypergrowth company like that.

Amar Kendale: Um, ah so I you know I think a lot of a lot of what I learned was that um that so often and you know the the stories that we hear. Um, ah you know often dramatized dramatize the breakthroughs and ah. I would say that in retrospect that there were not a lot of of discrete breakthroughs at lovango but there was a lot of ah persistence of vision and I think consistency in performance. So um, despite the fact that we were a very innovative company. I’d say that the Dna of Lavango was in many ways very operational. It was very much a day in day out. What have we done today. You know what is what is on the immediate horizon and so while we placed longer-term bets and took some big swings. We took you know took as many there was as many successes as there were failures. You know we had a um. A track record there where you know when we look back in cherry pick. It looks like all the right call all along. But I’d say that really that the the success factors at Lavango were really about about grinding and I think building a culture. I think that the leadership there built a culture that was very deliberate when it came to staying operationally focused not getting distracted by the flashy objects. You know the shiny objects and and emerging trends but really staying focused on our on our end user and our clients and and delivering for them day in and day out.

Amar Kendale: Um, for me that was actually a really big learning Alejandra especially having come From. You know what I would call like more glamorous technology-driven startup environments where the latest technology was a big part of of where the sort of impetus came you know in those in those businesses. Um. And you know I think it’s it’s ah ah something that’s very easy, especially as a technologist to fall into right fall in love with a technology and have a vision and see its potential and I think Livevo Levango Really um, woke me up to the fact that while that can be successful tomp sometimes. More predictable way to drive towards success is that incremental steady progress of knocking down problems that your user is facing.

Alejandro Cremades: And in your case I mean obviously the the the exposure here and also the experience at libongo you know, ended up lending you the role of chief product officer at Teleock which ended up like acquiring the company and you were there helping with the integration. But how that that lead. To you saying? hey you know what I’m going to go at it again and that ended up you know becoming Homeward your latest baby.

Amar Kendale: My latest baby? Yes, so ah, at during my time at Lavango we did have a very deliberate view of the impact we could have on people with chronic conditions and a lot of this I developed in partnership with. With Jenny Schneider who had been initially the chief medical officer at lavogo and was ultimately the president there and Jenny and I fairly quickly established this this sort of shared vision of how the core ideas that we had developed for for caring for people with diabetes really around bringing them information making it easy. Making it consistent on a regular use basis providing them with information they could act on creating feedback loops so that we could constantly improve that those concepts were extensible to other clinical areas and so it’s how we built a roadmap at lavango that took us from diabetes to hypertension to high cholesterol. Heart failure kidney disease mental health ah, and so um, we went from having a product to a portfolio. We evolved the business from serving 1 customer segment which was employers to serving others including health plans. Ah, all of that led us at Lavango to ultimately being a platform company. Focused on chronic conditions and so you know that that final chapter of lovango was our acquisition by Tallydoc and it was at a moment when ah, there was a recognition that the combination of of this sort of technology enabled chronic condition management coupled with teleedicine.

Amar Kendale: Could be something really radically different in terms of the way we could serve people um with health needs and so you know Teledock perceived it. We perceived it. It led to the the acquisition of of Lavago by teledoc you know at the time the largest acquisition in in digital healthcare Eighteen point five billion dollars deal um, I went in as a chief product officer and my main job was to integrate the teams and integrate the products and so I spent about six months doing that and the the team was on great footing when I left and and we were sort of starting to move in the direction of fulfilling the promise of what happens when you can couple. Doctors who can actually prescribe medication and change medications and give them access to this really great data. That’s being generated by the you know by the user our members the consumer in their daily life. You know at the point of care at the point where they can have real impact you know on on those individuals’ lives so that was the promise. And I think that there’s you know a long journey ahead. The company’s moving and in that direction broadly speaking. Um, what what I believed as I as I left and and the the things that um that my partner Jenny and I started to work on after I left were. Ah, really thinking about that next generation of healthcare and and where it was going to be focused and we had a few things that really merg for us as being critical in order to build on our learnings but really evolve evolve where healthcare is headed and accelerate one was.

Amar Kendale: We we developed a strong conviction that we need to align incentives structurally between patients and and ah practitioners so providers and payers and very typically we’ve found that. 2 of those were often aligned but never 3 you know whether the patient and the provider had a good relationship or the provider and the payer had a good relationship at Levango we managed to align the payer and the patient but ah, but we we recognize that we actually need to align all 3 and in order to be successful. We also appreciated that we learned so much about. The application of technology to these kinds of healthcare problems that there was an entire class of problems that could be solved if we could do novel things with with existing technology and the third thing we were very passionate about was focusing on underserved populations places where we could really have an impact address. You know the double triple quadruple bottom line. Sort of aspect of of healthcare and um and so that’s really what ultimately led us to shaping homeward thesis wise we were confident that primary care is going to become more and more segmented that people are going to experience primary care. That’s really for them and that over time this trend’s going to accelerate. So. Rather than a one size fitsall I go to a doctor who’s part of a health system and I get whatever care I get instead. We’ll see the emergence of brands and and those will speak to consumers and offer tailored care for the types of health needs that they may have based on based on who they are and where they live and what they do what we’re also going to see that.

Amar Kendale: Specialty care think you know cardiology oncology these high cost extremely highly trained highly skilled professionals. They’re currently physically chained to a hospital or health system or an office so covid taught us. That those people can be uncoupled that they can essentially be abstracted into the cloud and as long as they have great data. They can build a great relationship with their patient and deliver great care so specialty care in our thinking can be virtualized over time. It’s going to move in that direction and we’re going to unlock this sort of finite scarce resource and make it. Widely accessible. So it was those 2 ideas that really became the basis of homeward the segment we focused on is actually a huge one. It’s the 60,000,000 americans who live in rural communities. So this is about 20% of America and from an outcomes perspective. It is dramatically underserved so we have. 23% higher mortality in this population and as we dug deeper into this problem we learned was a lot of it has to do with in sufficienti supply of primary care. So there’s about half as many primary care doctors serving rural americans as there are for suburban and urban americans. And therefore we’re seeing ah you know a massive shortfall of preventive care. The other thing we see and it relates to our second thesis is that there’s an eighth as many specialists so you can imagine that if you have heart disease and.

Amar Kendale: Ah, and it’s it’s a complex condition and you can’t see a cardiologist for six months well you might not have six months and if you live in a rural community today that might be a reality so how do we bridge you know space and time to bring that cardiology expertise to you in a way that can save your life so those were really the things that made it very compelling for us. Ah, to focus on Homeward and so Jenny and I started this company in 2021 with the backing of general Catalyst Heymontonia who had been that backer at at Lavango in the very early days as well. Um. Supported us in helping to shape the thesis and and start the company and since then we’ve been off to the races. Yeah, so ah as a value-based care provider. We make money when we save money so that the gist of it is our incentives are aligned with our patient and our payer.

Alejandro Cremades: Nice. So then how do you guys make money. What’s the business model. Well.

Amar Kendale: And a value-based care model is one in which we operate as a as a provider who takes full risk on the population. We manage so 100% of the medical costs are you know are delegated to us by a payer and it’s our job to make sure that one we’re keeping this population healthy. And we’re measuring progress along the way through tracking our our clinical quality and and progress but more definitively we’re tracking our progress by by avoiding negative healthcare consequences which are also driving high cost. So the early signals we look for are have you been able to keep people out of the emergency room. Have been able to keep people out of the hospital and the fact is if we are doing a good job of diagnostics and preventive care. The answer is going to be yes and it’s something that’s pretty uniquely enabled by these value-based care models where in traditional healthcare where providers get paid for the services they deliver not the outcomes. They’re incentivized ah to take on more of those high-cost procedures. They’re disincentivized to take on low-cost low value things which preventive care is mostly in that category so that shifting that incentive is actually a really important fulcrum. Value-based care models and it’s one that allows us to lean into preventive care. So ah, the way that Homeward works is is we we take responsibility for a population. We go very hard at at helping to characterize the needs of that population from a preventive care perspective.

Amar Kendale: And then we field all the right interventions to keep those individuals from progressing in their conditions or diseases and from ultimately ending up in acute scenarios that can be both bad for the patient and also very high cost.

Alejandro Cremades: And how much capital you were talking about general catalyst they before how much capital have you guys raised to date for investors.

Amar Kendale: So ah, so the the series a we raised? ah $20,000,000 and we went on to raise another 50,000,000 or so in our series b ah the the great news is with with such strategic backers as general catalyst and then we went on to bring on. Human capital and arch as investors in our in our series b um, you know we’ve really thought about this business as one that we’re building for the long-term and I think that’s one of the great things about investors who have a long-term mindset and ah and the mentality that. The goal is to solve the problem and that financing is a means to an end and that you know as long as we as long as we’re building in a paste way that demonstrates real results for people that we can continue to think big and think about the bigger problems we’re trying to solve so we’ve been able to. To I think secure this this very like mindded valuesdrive group of investors ah to support the company and that’s a big part of why we raised our series b preemptively in August of last year

Alejandro Cremades: Now obviously you know when you’re speaking with investors you got to talk about vision. So if we’re thinking about vision imagine you know if you were to go to sleep tonight and you wake up in a world where the vision of Homeward is is fully realized what does that world look like.

Amar Kendale: Um.

Amar Kendale: Well, you know I’d say that that this vision it leaves us with a lot of headrooms. So you know first and foremost you know we’re focused on the needs of people in rural america as I mentioned this is 60000000 people in America. Ah. Have ah a similar category of of problems in the sense that they’re generally speaking geographically dispersed and therefore their physical proximity to care ah is simply just not as convenient as it is for people in urban and urban environments and then that results in a lot of downstream consequences. Um. You know our our vision would be for for that group of people to have healthcare outcomes that are just as good as the rest of America if not better and I think that if not better is actually an interesting thing to think about Alejandra because the models we’re exploring and innovating in um are designed expressly for rural communities. So for example, we’re really pushing the frontier of care as far into the community as possible. We see people in their homes we use mobile clinics in order to see people in their communities. So we can move a mobile clinic around we deploy very asset light small footprint clinics. Existing built space in ways that are extremely nimble so you can think about this as ah as analogous to the way that we’ve leapt from kind of mainframes you know to computers to smartphones where we’ve really pushed the edge of the network really far out and we’ve moved a lot of that power out to end-user imagine if we could do that in healthcare.

Amar Kendale: If We could push all of that capability out you know from these hospitals which are centralized into the palm of people’s hands and into their homes and their daily lives. So The the thing that I think is really interesting about a vision like ours which is to shift that frontier of care into people’s homes and their daily lives is one that is. Critical for rural Americans because they have no choice that said it’s also critical for many other Americans who are underserved and you know as we’ve been ah you know sort of telling the the homeward story and and building relationships with partners and.

Amar Kendale: And explaining how our model works for rural america the next question we get almost inevitably is well when can you do this for my underserved urban populations and the answer is not yet, you know we have a very clear focus on on who we need to serve first. But I think it speaks to um, the fact that that you know the the broader. Long arc here is that there are healthcare disparities like this that exist all across America you know rural America being where it’s often the worst but all across America and that um, you know as we’re able to demonstrate that these solutions really work for people that they have the potential to reach many more people. Um. The other thing I’ll say is you know we’ve we’ve begun with a firm footing in America but as you might also imagine ah these sorts of healthcare needs are global and these challenges that people face with access to healthcare you know in the palm of their hands in the comfort of their homes ah is just as acute and just as severe in places with different. Different business models and so as we learn both how the solution works and also how to adapt what we’re doing to other business models I think the the reach of of the work we’re doing has a potential to extend across the world.

Alejandro Cremades: Now let’s we’re talking about future here now. Let’s talk about past with a length of reflection. So if you could go back in time and have a chat with that younger self that younger yourself that have moved you know again to California and I was thinking about maybe starting something of your own. Let’s say if you were able to sit down with that younger self.

Amar Kendale: Um.

Alejandro Cremades: And give that younger self a piece of advice before launching a business. What would that be and why give me what you know now.

Amar Kendale: I think I would probably ah grab a hold of my shoulders and shake myself and say do not fall in love with technology and I think that is probably the single biggest ah you know pitfall that I was. I was ah a sort of subject too as a technologist I’m trained. Ah you know to to appreciate the power of technology to be able to visualize what it might do in the future and really extrapolate. Ah, you know potential outcomes but the but the risk of that. Is falling in love with the technology means that you might lose sight of the of the problem and pushing a technology into a market is a hundred times harder than ah, the technology being pulled into a market where there’s a really clear and strong user need you know problem to be solved. So ah, you know I think this this. Skill set of really immersing in the problem space being comfortable in the problem space before deciding to go after it. Um, that’s a skill that’s taken me a long time to develop and one that I I wish I had appreciated earlier. Um I’d say that the other thing I learned about have learned about problem finding. Is that there’s ah um, a a benefit to being a technologist or having a technology orientation when it comes to finding problems in that you can take a first principles approach. You can have a beginner’s mind when you’re looking at a problem and trying to understand it.

Amar Kendale: Trying to understand it deeply from first principles means you’re not going to fall into the trap of of pattern matching incorrectly which is a very you know easy trap to fall into especially as an entrepreneur, especially as a technologist where you you know you see a lot of patterns and you’re looking to make decisions confidently and quickly. But. If you if you misidentify the problem then you could be living with something that’s heading you in the wrong direction for a long time so that second lesson for me has been making sure that I give myself the time and space to take a first principles approach to validating a problem.

Alejandro Cremades: I love it now for the people are listening Amar that will love to reach out and say hi. What is the best way for them to do so yeah.

Amar Kendale: So I’m at homewardheth.com so that’s a kendale at homewardhealth.com and ah you can reach me at Linkedin ah at a kendale as well.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well here are super nice chatting here. Thank you so much for being on the deal maker show it. It has been an honor to have you with us today.

Amar Kendale: Ah, it’s been such a delight alejandro. Thank you so much for the opportunity.

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