Othman Laraki On Raising $350 Million To Build The First Virtual Cancer Clinic

In the ever-evolving landscape of technology and entrepreneurship, few stories are as multifaceted and inspiring as that of Othman Laraki. This interview dives into Othman’s story, offering a deep exploration of the world of building, scaling, and transforming companies.

Othman relates his experiences working in healthcare and artificial intelligence and eventually building Color Health. This venture has attracted funding from top-tier investors like General Catalyst Partners, Viking Global Investors, Emerson Collective, and T. Rowe Price.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Othman Laraki’s exposure to a multicultural environment shaped his global perspective and influenced his approach to technology and entrepreneurship.
• Epitrope failed despite its innovative vision for mobile internet. He learned that having the right idea at the wrong time can be as detrimental as having the wrong idea altogether.
• His experience at Google during its early days exposed him to “moonshot” projects and an environment of relentless innovation, emphasizing the importance of pushing technical boundaries.
• At Mixer Labs and later at Twitter, Othman played a pivotal role in stabilizing Twitter’s infrastructure during massive growth. He also observed the profound societal impact of technology, mainly how misinformation can gain a competitive advantage in social media.
• Othman’s company, Color Health, is leveraging artificial intelligence to address healthcare inefficiencies. His work aims to streamline access to critical health services, particularly in cancer prevention and management.
• Othman highlights the monopolistic nature of healthcare markets, dominated by insurance companies focused on financial gain rather than improving health outcomes, making it hard for technologists to innovate.
• Othman emphasizes the importance of balancing vision with realism, being open to pivots based on market feedback, and surrounding oneself with talented people. These lessons have shaped his success across multiple ventures.

 

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About Othman Laraki:

Othman Laraki is a technology entrepreneur, an investor, and the co-founder and CEO of Color Health. Othman was an early Product leader at Google, where he worked on performance infrastructure and client-side software, including the Google Chrome browser.

After leaving Google, he co-founded Mixer Labs, which was one of Twitter’s first acquisitions. At Twitter, Othman was the Vice President of Product, helping create the company’s first revenue products and grow the user base from 50 to 200 million users.

After leaving Twitter, Othman co-founded Color Health, which he has been leading for the past ten years.

Othman holds degrees in computer science and management from Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a long-time investor and advisor to leading companies such as Pinterest, AngelList, Slack, Instacart, Gitlab, and others.

Connect with Othman Laraki:

• LinkedIn
• RocketReach
• Crunchbase
• TheOrg

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: All righty. Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Deal Maker Show. So today we have an amazing founder, a founder that was born in Morocco you know and raised in Casablanca. And again, incredible story. you know like He’s done it all, ah not only on the founder side also, on the investment side. He’s quite active.

Alejandro Cremades: But again, building, scaling, financing, you know also why healthcare is a tough space ah to really be become an entrepreneur. ah Really the excitement too about Gen AI, you know that wave that is saying that is right now out there, and as well as you know why the cancer space. But again, you know he’s done it too on building, scaling, and getting it all the way to the finish line as well. So we’re going to be talking about the transactional side too. So without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today.

Alejandro Cremades: Othman Laraki, welcome to the show.

Othman Laraki: and Andro, thank you for having me. Great to see you.

Alejandro Cremades: So originally born in Casablanca, Morocco, you know, and raised there. So how was life growing up in in Morocco?

Othman Laraki: It’s a wonderful place. I mean, one thing I always tell people is like, ah it’s ah about Morocco, and I’m sure you’ve been there coming from Spain, is that it’s ah really a place that’s at the intersection of so many cultures and aspects of the world where yeah it’s a very Obviously, it’s known in Arab and Muslim country, but it’s also a very long-standing. Actually, the majority of Moroccans are Berber, so kind of the original kind of inhabitants of the ah Northwest Africa. um Very strong like ah Jewish influence, a very long-standing Jewish population.

Othman Laraki: huge influence on an interchange with Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. So it’s a really kind of like, you know, blended, you know, country and community. And so it’s always really fun to take people there. and And so, yeah, growing up there was a really fun and interesting, interesting place. I mean, it just gives a lot of perspective, you know, when you experience different parts of the world. So, yeah, it was a good good place. I highly recommend ah visiting.

Alejandro Cremades: how How do you get out of all things into computers being there in Morocco?

Othman Laraki: you know my so my So my father was an entrepreneur his entire career and very into like, you know, he’s not technical by by background, but he was kind of like ah you know a bit of a nerd, like loved like new technology, et cetera. And I ah literally, you know, sometimes you have a memory as a kid, like of that stands out in your life. i And he, I must have been like maybe six or seven. And one day he walks in with a computer like ah and a brand that doesn’t exist anymore called Amstrad. And it was a computer that still had like tape decks, you know, where, you know, you need to put a cassette tape to up to run a program. And in Morocco at the time, actually, you know, you couldn’t buy the computer games. So I would get

Othman Laraki: um these magazines with the program written on them. So you’d you have like 50 pages of computer code that you needed to type in to play a game. And so, you know, that was kind of my my introduction to to computers. And, you know, so that was kind of like, the you know, the early, early introduction and just kind of it was ah yeah a great way to start learning and and appreciate you know from the from the early days you know how all these pieces were coming together.

Alejandro Cremades: So typically, you know, in places like Spain or let’s say Morocco, you know, what happens is that you stay with your parents all the way until you get married, you know, the good life, you know, there. But but in your case, you know, at 18, you decided to pack up the box and come to the US. That’s quite a bold move.

Othman Laraki: yeah i know yeah ill sort of mean i’m I’m sure it’s probably a similar story for you. like It’s not like I had a frankly like a plan ahead. right like It was what was but seemed like the right move at the time. I was really excited about you know engineering. and actually At the time, I was actually more even thinking of going down the route and studying physics.

Othman Laraki: But I was fortunate to get it into into Stanford for undergrad, so at eighteen I moved to the Bay Area. But it was right when the internet, ah the first internet wave was happening, so 1996. And so happened to land here and be interested in computers at this you know incredible moment in time where um you know I remember like you know meeting Jerry Yang, who had just started Yahoo, a few weeks into being ah an undergrad. and um you know Larry and Sergey from Google were doing their PhDs there at the time. and

Othman Laraki: um actually i got into running this entrepreneurship speaker series after my first year there. And the professor I worked with ah called Tom Kosnick, he gave me the name of this like he’s like you know this Japanese entrepreneur. He’s really interesting. You should try to invite him.

Othman Laraki: and And it was Masa from Softbank. This was like 1996, 1997, where you know he was still at at the beginning of his journey. But it was this ah just incredible moment in time to um you know see all these people who would change the you know the the industry, create the industry, not just change it, but create it. So this is a yeah really ah interesting moment to to be there. But yeah, so I mean, at the time, I mean i had no real plans around how long I’d be into in here or whether I’d go back or not for my career, but you know just yeah you know being in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley is just such an amazing place to to build new companies. So that’s kind of where I’ve i’ve stayed since then.

Alejandro Cremades: Now, in your case, um you know when you’re in Stanford, as you were saying, you’re like surrounded by surrounded by innovation. Instead of like starting a company, which is why you would do the ramen noodles you know and all that stuff right after college, in your case, you decided to become a software engineer ah and they you you actually worked for several companies. Eventually, how did that moment come of you coming up with the idea of Epitrope, which was your first company?

Othman Laraki: Yeah, i you know so you know really the genesis of that was, this was we we were it was at the end of my undergrad at Stanford and you know there’s you know the fork that I think a lot of software engineers have, which is, do you join a bigger company? or and Actually, at the time, you know the Google was just getting started. and you know I knew Larry sergey and Sergey. I later joined Google, but at the time, I was like, you know who needs another search engine? you know There’s already Yahoo and Excite, et cetera. I was like, you know I’ll just start my own thing. and so we and We just kind of collected like

Othman Laraki: a group of the some of the more some of the smartest people we knew and just started meeting up, every you know just spending time in a in in the same building and you know hacking different software ideas. And and that was the genesis of Epitro, the first company. And at the time where we really focused was on mobile, we thought mobile internet was going to be a big deal. This is 2000.

Othman Laraki: um It turned out you know in the big scheme of things, it was the wrong timing. we We were fortunate to get connected with a Japanese company called Access Systems, which had built the browser and the kind of infrastructure for the i-mode in Japan.

Othman Laraki: And so we still ended up getting a really interesting mobile internet experience. um But it was, you know, years before the iPhone and at the time when the industry was still completely locked up. And, you know, I think one of the lessons from that, frankly, was also like sometimes a right idea at the wrong time is kind of indistinguishable from just the wrong idea altogether. you know At the time, it was just like so difficult to build something and ah give that you know make it accessible to to people. So um it was ah it was ah definitely ah an interesting journey, but yeah, we ended up spending a lot of a lot of good time in Japan, but it was ah definitely too early for for its for its time, I think.

Alejandro Cremades: And then from there to MIT, but they hey, once an entrepreneur entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur. So why join in Google instead of like maybe trying it again?

Othman Laraki: Yeah, you know like ah so when I was ah finishing off at MIT, like the ah By then, i mean a lot of almost everyone I knew had joined Google was at a time when you know Google was about under a thousand people.

Othman Laraki: um you know By then, it was clear that it was this incredible platform where it was on this huge ascendancy. and was you know It was also a window of time where it’s like almost the honeymoon phase with the media and the world etc where everyone just like love google google had like almost infinite resources and for someone who enjoys building um you know it was a time where you can kind of show up and as long as you are. Building interesting products and interesting and interested in spending all of your time and headspace trying to innovate.

Othman Laraki: the environment was almost perfect for it. And so for someone ah with a as a builder, it was just you know being in a candy shop. So so I joined joined Google in 2004. I mean, it was a wonderful window of time where ah yeah it was filled this kind of Cambrian an era where it’s like there were just like so many new things to build. like you know the The entire space was growing so so so rapidly. so So those were some some really, ah really good years.

Alejandro Cremades: So from the time there, you know, I mean, obviously, you know, like that was the time where incredible people, I mean, still incredible talent, you know, were there at Google, but I’ve met so many people that they were actually in Google during those years and have gone out and created incredible companies. So how was the atmosphere, the culture, the people that you were surrounded by during those years at Google?

Othman Laraki: Yeah. You know, like one ah one of the interesting memories, I mean, I remember from that is like it was literally several years where I did not remember a single offer we made that didn’t get taken for for hiring someone. Like, you know, it was such a, because I mean, keep in mind too, right? Like, you know, the internet bubble happened, massive growth. Then the internet bubble popped.

Othman Laraki: and I mean, it was the Bay Area was like you know a war zone, right? like you know I remember driving down in in my kind of prior startup down Highway 237, which goes by Cisco and all the so semiconductor companies in close to San Jose. I used to have like a 40-minute drive to work.

Othman Laraki: And with all of the layoffs, it was actually similar to COVID when they shut everything down. It was like 45-minute drive went down to about 15 minutes because all of these companies had laid off so many people, right? like so was a you know coming off a window of time where everyone was like, okay, the internet is over, this was overhyped. you know All this idea of you know you know a new era coming is was really just kind of a bunch of BS, pack up and go home, go back to McKinsey or whatever. And and so you had this… like And then when Google like really kind of

Othman Laraki: started exploding, it was, I think, the reopening of optimism and of access and scale. And I think what happened there is that you know Google was also you know it was founded by Google. a pair of super nerds who brought in all of their super nerd friends and hired and know did an amazing job hiring all these people from Bell Labs and from all these you you know deeply academic and deeply intellectual, but like very like software engineering, like purists in a way.

Othman Laraki: And so it was this place where you know you had this kind of combination of incredible like economic resources, but also incredible like intellectual talent that um you know just made it possible to to have this level of ambition that, I mean, I have not witnessed since. I mean, there have been like many other incredible companies obviously created since then and so on, but like that that window of time, of that combination of at scale, of i mean intensity and ah and willingness to you know take on. like Even right now, like you know everyone is used to like now the hyperscalers thinking of, like oh, you know you have ah you have you know data centers with with hundreds of so thousands of machines, et cetera. i mean At the time, the scale at which Google was pushing things was like

Othman Laraki: Literally unheard of right like it was you’d show up inside and you’d be like Wait, someone made an error. There are like two extra zeros on everything that you’re doing. here ah Right. Like, you know, I remember like, you know, you know, some you know early machine learning models that were being working on, you know, a million parameters, which at the time would, you know, like now it seems like, you know, quaint, but at the time was like, just, you know, seemed to defy logic. Right. And so, and so that was like just kind of this really, uh,

Othman Laraki: interesting moment right like where you can be like, okay, like if it’s technically possible, we can actually do it. and so it ah you know so like Things like you know the the genesis of um you know Android or Chrome, or even products like Gmail and Google Maps, right like where you could think of, it’s like, oh, we’re going to go and map the entire world. right like Now that seems like, oh, it’s been done.

Othman Laraki: In retrospect, it seems easy, but at the time, it was like these things that looked like you know moon landing style endeavors. I mean, kind of the stuff that now we experience when we see like you know a SpaceX you know booster landing, right? like It was that kind of type of like technical achievements that was happening in a routinely in a way, and that that you know that that was kind of a pretty pretty unique window of time, I think.

Alejandro Cremades: Now, after that, you decided to go at it again, and you started Mixer Labs, which ended up being the second acquisition by Twitter. So how was how is it like that journey to, and and in this case, having an acquisition by a company that ended up becoming a household? No, everyone knows about Twitter. Now, X.

Othman Laraki: Yeah, yeah you know so yeah with ah with Mixer Labs, we had started off ah in the geo space, so this was right when you know when the like This is when the iPhone and Android started supporting the GPS API. So like you know people forget, right? like At the beginning, i’ve mobile phones did not know about location. And so there were all these kind of early mobile attempt doing geo-based applications. Like actually, Sam Altman’s first startup, a company called Looped,

Othman Laraki: you know used to do all these things to try to do triangulation with cell towers and all this complicated stuff. And all of a sudden, mobile phones you know added into the standard API, you know just a GPS API, which is actually one of the things I worked on at Google before leaving. But like the all of a sudden, it became like this one API call and you can get ah a phone’s location.

Othman Laraki: And that opened up like a whole new kind of wave of, like oh what does it look like to build applications that are aware of location? And you know we we start we were building kind of the infrastructure to be able to build these applications, and um and Twitter you know Started off, one of the big arcs behind it was this kind of hyper-local instantaneous community dynamic. And so we joined um in part because of that goal for Twitter to to build kind of a more kind of like geo-based local service. In practice, you know if you remember at the time, the fail whale days where Twitter was down half of the time, et cetera,

Othman Laraki: And the team from Mixer Labs was this like really, really, really strong like engineering team. And in practice, what we really ended up… Most of the value we created was much less related to geo stuff, but much more around helping build the Twitter infrastructure. so how you build and release the software so the system doesn’t crash. um How do you get Twitter into a ah much more stable data center? like that was actually I ran the the the project of getting Twitter into multi-data center mode so you can have it be distributed and not crash all the time and run in a production data center and so on.

Othman Laraki: So we ended up actually doing much more like systems work, so deep in the infrastructure. um And actually, a lot of that, I think, still lives to today. um And and you know i mean it’s one of those, again, like similar to the Google journey, but you know we were fortunate to be there at a time when it was just like this explosive growth rate. When we joined, it might have been like about 15 or so million users um to almost a quarter million a quarter billion users by the time by the time I left. um And so that was, ah again, like one of those

Othman Laraki: really interesting, you know, fun windows of time where also like, I mean, Twitter was also such a unlike Google, I think Twitter was also a very social phenomenon. like you know I had never been in a and a social company. Google was a very nerdy company, and Twitter was really ah much more of a… It’s almost a social company that happened to do technology. and so you know We’d have like people like you know Lady Gaga would come visiting, or Erdogan came to our office one time, or Medvedev. One time, you know it’s like I remember drive you know driving into the parking lot, coming going up the elevator, and there’s these huge guys

Othman Laraki: And it’s like, what’s going on? And there’s guys that look like you know closets. And it’s like, oh, they’re like you know security detail. It’s like, oh, yeah, Medvedev is in the building.

Othman Laraki: And you know it’s a was ah kind of a it just just kind of interesting company because it’s still very small, but like

Alejandro Cremades: Grotto.

Othman Laraki: was at the intersection of society experiencing technology. i mean Also, it was during like the Arab Spring, for example, right like you know and you know being kind of Moroccan and growing up in North Africa. right like It was very interesting to you know for to be there during the Arab Spring and seeing the effect that Twitter was having on, or not effect, I think in some ways I was overplayed, but I feel almost like Twitter was a one of the tools through which society you know changed pretty fundamentally, I think. That was kind of an interesting time. I mean i do also mean, one thing that’s kind of also interesting in that when you think back, right like I remember having this anxiety and actually discussing and debating this with with with Jack um at the time, which was like which is very topical to today.

Othman Laraki: Just when you step back you know and you think about the effect of social media on society, right like the you know we were building this kind of, and us and obviously Facebook and Instagram, et cetera.

Othman Laraki: We were building these tools that I think changed the fabric of how information and relationships flow across human societies. And obviously no one has a playbook because all these things are happening you know for the first time. But one of the things I remember being very anxious about is that in the in this world new world that we were kind of all participating in, that the ah like like truth or accuracy does not have a competitive advantage. If you think of information propagation as a almost like a ah ah survival or a natural selection process,

Othman Laraki: you know And you ask, okay, like you know over time and you know in historically, right? Like how ideas and religions or beliefs and so on propagate. And what are the dynamics that enable an idea to be believed by a lot of people? um We were deeply changing the the substrate along which that was that was happening.

Othman Laraki: And in that environment, if you say, okay, I have one piece of information that’s ah true, true information and one piece that’s like made up. The made-up information actually has a competitive advantage in that it’s not encumbered by reality right like and the you know this new world that we were all kind of now we’re all living in. There’s no competitive advantage to to accurate information or to truth or to kind of like in some ways. and that that yeah It’s not like I have a better answer, but it’s like it was kind of an interesting

Othman Laraki: dynamic ah that we’ we’re already grappling with at the time that, frankly, it’s still you know very much an issue, right? Like where you know we we have we have not, I think, succeeded yet at making you know um even the definition of truth, I think, has gotten really ah ah you know questioned in a pretty pretty fundamental way, ah in part thanks because of all these these tools. and so um you know so it’s kind of i mean I think Twitter was just like a very interesting you know interesting company ah from that respect, right like and you know or just participated in a very kind of interesting like social phenomenon, I find. so

Alejandro Cremades: And how do you go from being in that a social phenomenon you know kind of environment to all of a sudden deciding to take on healthcare?

Othman Laraki: Yeah. It was like many decisions. It was not necessarily thought out or deliberate. It was kind of sometimes you know the you know the opportunities and the you know challenges find you. and But the the the root of it was my co-founder in Mixer Labs and he was ah we worked together. We were you know close friends from the Google days. ah It’s got Elad Gil who’s a very active investor and um you know has been kind of a partner and or kind of in this journey. We were both at Twitter because we started Mix-A-Lads. We were there together. and But he has a he had a biology background, so he had he had also been at MIT, but he had been a biology PhD.

Othman Laraki: And this was the early days of genetics and he got his genome sequence and he brought it on a hard drive. And I remember we were sitting on the terrace at Twitter and he just kind of you know handed me his genius it hard drive to like you know go and play with it. And so I kind of went and started like just kind of like learning about genetic information, et cetera. And you know one thing that kind of like as we started kind of like exploring the data, um it struck us that there was this kind of wave, what looked like a wave that was coming of genetics information getting very, very accessible and cheap.

Othman Laraki: um But the software to it’s fundamentally a ah place where health care and data kind of intersect. And it was striking to us that there was no good software to be able to really analyze and understand genetics um and so really initially we know i kind of like.

Othman Laraki: Started my journey in healthcare more with the software had being like oh, there’s a lot of data coming into healthcare and You know it seemed like the software infrastructure for it was still pretty um You know nascent um and so got interested that way There was another connection to me personally, which is that so my my grandmother had passed away from breast cancer. My mother is a two-time breast cancer survivor and um we discovered that she has a mutation in a gene called VRCA2, BRCA2, which I also carry.

Othman Laraki: It’s actually relevant to you. i’t it’s it’s a It’s a Spanish mutation because her mother was Spanish. and it’s ah It came from it’s originated in Spain, and i so I’m in care of this mutation as well, which increases people’s risk of different cancers.

Othman Laraki: um And so I got also really interested personally and initially from that intersection of genetics and cancer, but also what it means to be able to use this data to help people’s health in a proactive way. um And so that was really the beginning, really. And you know so I started in healthcare. care not knowing anything about the industry, right like just being interested in the and the science and the technology.

Othman Laraki: um you know Obviously, it’s been now an 11-, 12-year journey and and with color, where i’ve I’ve learned a lot about the the healthcare care industry as an entrepreneur, but it’s ah it’s it’s a very, very different um you know industry, I think, than anything else that I’d encountered before.

Alejandro Cremades: That’s a lot of years.

Othman Laraki: and so um you know

Alejandro Cremades: Why do you think it’s so off what do you what do you think healthcare is so tough for entrepreneurs as an industry to to innovate in?

Othman Laraki: Yeah, you know, whenever I meet like a, you know… tech nerd like me and was thinking about, you know, everyone gets excited by healthcare care because it’s a huge industry and it’s like a lot of opportunities for impact and and problems to solve. You know, one thing I always tell people as a disclaimer is like in the ah in the game of entrepreneurship, it’s like dialing the difficulty level to 11 and tying handy hand behind your back. It’s like, you know, it’s it’s definitely one of the hardest, I think, places to be an entrepreneur.

Othman Laraki: as a especially as a technologist. um the A lot of people think that the reason for that is because of regulation. I actually don’t think that’s right. I think the reason why healthcare is such a difficult industry is that it is a ah deeply um ah kind of monopolistically kind of constrained industry. When you look at how the market works in healthcare care and how money flows,

Othman Laraki: it is an extremely illiquid market where if you build a product and you’re like you know in most other industries, you know whether in the SaaS or in you know as a consumer, et cetera, you build a product and if it’s a way better product that’s much cheaper, you have an open marketplace to compete in and you can gain market share relatively rapidly just on the direct competition. Whereas in healthcare, care the way The way to think about it is like all of the money, like the vast majority of the money in healthcare care is in the US especially, is like pooled with insurance companies.

Othman Laraki: that then funnel where the money and how the money flows. And what the business model that most insurance companies fundamentally adopt is not really about being better at managing people’s health and making a margin competing on quality of healthcare. care It’s really about taking the the rents and the margin out of the clinical services.

Othman Laraki: And so when you think about as a product builder, if you’re at the service layer, it is a very difficult competition to be able to build something and have a strategy that where you can actually access the market and and extract the value that you create, right? which is what most functioning markets provide. but And so I think that’s what makes healthcare care very, very difficult is that it’s fundamentally, I mean, when you look at like, I mean, as someone who’s both tech and healthcare, when I look at all the antitrust stuff happening right now with talks about breaking up Google, etc., I mean, it is

Othman Laraki: To me, it is unbelievable that it’s like we’re not like if there’s a real deregulation or antitrust problem in the US economy, it is number one is healthcare, whether it’s the payers, the PBNs, where you know you look at you know the fact that a company like United Health Group is a Fortune 5 company. It’s not because they they’re good at healthcare, care it’s because they’re good at extracting the rents of healthcare.

Othman Laraki: And that is, I think, where there is like the… And it you know and that’s on 20% of our economy, right? like it is The amount of cost in the system is so much bigger in that than anything that you know a Google or an Amazon, et cetera. There might be antitrust kind of questions there, but like I think it is way, way bigger in healthcare actually than than any other industry.

Alejandro Cremades: So, for the people that are listening to ah to get it, what ended up being the business model of color? How are you guys making money?

Othman Laraki: Yeah, so you know we we iterated a lot. like So we pivoted the number of times and we’ve had… I’ll actually tell you where we are now and I can also walk through how we got there, but over time we evolved into this vertically integrated care delivery company where… So we we run a 50 state medical group so we can actually practice, we actually run With doctors, we run healthcare care programs. We also run a diagnostics infrastructure and lab laboratories so that we can actually provide testing that we run ourselves and process.

Othman Laraki: And we have software and systems around it. And so what we sell are these big population programs um to big buyers, whether it’s in government like the and NIH or to big employers. So right now the main core of Color’s business is we run the country’s first 50-state virtual cancer clinic, which is a ah rethinking of how you manage cancer Add for large populations are main customers today are big employers like you know um you know large companies whether it’s like you know tech companies like sales force or big unions like the teamsters like truck driver unions um or pension funds and what we do is like for them.

Othman Laraki: Healthcare is the after salaries is the number one operating cost for most of these big populations. And cancer is about 15% to 20% of total cost of care. So you know you can think of cancer, it’s almost 3% of US GDP. it’s likes We spend more on cancer than we do like on like probably on defense. or it’s like It’s such a huge, huge industry.

Othman Laraki: And today cancer is completely unmanaged, right? Like where you know because people get diagnosed, late stage cancers cost like a quarter million dollar each, and we don’t even necessarily do a great job at saving people’s lives. And so what we did is we built this virtual cancer clinic that says like, how do you from all the way from screening, like catching cancers early to managing someone when they’re diagnosed through treatments, all the way through survivorship,

Othman Laraki: a modern age rethinking of how do you do that at a national level um for these very big distributed populations? because when you think of a big company or a big like union across the US, they have people all over the place. So you can’t think you cant to just serve them in San Francisco or Atlanta, right? like You have to be able to serve people across dozens of cities and so on. And so that’s what we do. So that’s what we sell as a way to take control of cancer and deliver better outcomes for people.

Alejandro Cremades: And how much capital have you guys raised to date? And then also how has it been the journey of going through the financing rounds too?

Othman Laraki: Yes, so we’ve we’ve raised about $350 million dollars over the company’s life. um we We’ve been fortunate as like in the several of the things we’ve done over time, we this model is actually extremely capital efficient.

Othman Laraki: And so for a number of the programs that we’ve ran over time, they’re very cash flow positive. So actually right now, all the capital that color has is actually not from fundraising, but more from our own cash flows. But where, for example, we run a lot of the services for a million person program with NIH called the All of Us program. Or during COVID, for example, we ran a lot of the public health testing or vaccination programs across the country.

Othman Laraki: And the this model allows us to both give services that are very inexpensive and equitable, but also very cashflow positive. and so um And so we were fortunate that we you know we we had really good packing from investors early on, but now our’re have been primarily running on cash that the company has generated over time. and so um But so in terms of fundraising, i mean you know fundraising in healthcare is generally more challenging, I think, than AI or any of these because like it’s it is just a ah more difficult industry. it’s like the It is more difficult to generate great returns compared to you know capital light, very high multiple industries. like Fundamentally, when you look at multiples in healthcare, care

Othman Laraki: they’re much lower than, you know, SaaS companies, for example. And so, um you know, that just generally makes it a ah harder game to play, but obviously, much bigger impacts, you know, people’s lives and, you know, and it is, you know, obviously a very, very large industry.

Alejandro Cremades: So obviously, you know, I’d like to ask you this one. If you go to sleep tonight and you wake up in a world where the vision of color is fully realized, what does that world look like?

Othman Laraki: and What it looks like is you know when you think about the services or like the access to healthcare today to keep you healthy or deal with problems when they arise.

Othman Laraki: you know like you probably you know um i umm not how old you arelandro but like you know say you turn 45 and you need the colonoscopy to start getting colonoscopies or that you need to get tested for prostate cancer risk. Today, your experience is that you know you need to find a primary care doctor, go see them so they can give you a referral. You go to a lab to get a test or go to… a you know to get um There are all these hoops that you need to jump through. And imagine you you live in New York, but say you lived a hundred miles from New York. That means like traveling, et cetera, and oftentimes spending money out of pocket. First of all, the vision behind what we do is like you get top quality expertise that does all this work for you in the background where you just automatically get scheduled for the things that you need to keep you healthy.

Othman Laraki: If ever you get a diagnosis, instead of you waiting for multiple months to see an oncologist and for treatment to start, et cetera, as soon as diagnosis happens, all the next steps that need to be taken care of are already done for you automatically. So for example, actually we have a partnership with OpenAI. We built this product called the Cancer Copilot that we use right now.

Othman Laraki: where as soon as someone gets diagnosed, we can immediately start preparing them for treatments instead of waiting multiple weeks. And these things have like sometimes like make a 10, 20% change in probability that you survived the cancer. And so I think like my vision or our vision for healthcare care is that science, there’s all these amazing things that science establishes. But when you look at the practical reality of the care that people get, it’s very far below.

Othman Laraki: you know To give you just one concrete example, today the highest mortality cancer in the US is lung cancer. A lot of it driven by smoking. If someone has a lot of smoking history, they should get an annual lung CT past the age of 50. Today, 94% of people who should get a lung cancer screen do not get it. And it’s not because They’re dumb. It’s not because it’s expensive. It’s not because they don’t want to do it. It’s because it’s a pain in the ass. You need to jump through a bunch of hoops. You need to pay out of pocket. It’s inconvenience and so on.

Othman Laraki: Closing that gap, literally getting lung cancer people at lung cancer risk to get their annual screenings would have a bigger impact on cancer mortality than any cancer drug that’s ever been put on the market in the history of cancer.

Othman Laraki: That’s the difference between the science and the lived reality. And it’s just an access problem. It’s literally a simplicity and convenience and transactional efficiency problem. So it’s a market problem, not a scientific or medical problem. So I think that’s the gap, the opportunity to close. And that’s what really excites me about the intersection of technology is I think things like AI and just general digital health, et cetera, does is that is not that it completely changes the nature of science, is that it change it blows up old business models and allows new ones to exist, right? Like where things that we used to think of as being expensive and being inconvenient or scarce so become abundance, right? Like to you for to you and me today, right? Like if I need to talk with an expert in prostate cancer,

Othman Laraki: It’ll take hours of time and weeks or months of delay to be able to have that interaction. I think what technology can do is make that a five second or a 10 second overhead to get that level of expertise, to make that level of expertise accessible. So I think that’s really kind of the the the opportunity and obviously, again, it’s like very, very hard, I think, to achieve. So, you know, i’m not diluting myself, but I think that’s the, the you know, the potential.

Alejandro Cremades: So you’re three companies in now. oh man So if I could bring you back in time you know to that point where you were like walking around the campus in Stanford and thinking about a world of starting your own company and and and becoming an entrepreneur, if you were able to show up there and have a chat with your younger self and you were able to give that younger self one piece of advice is for launching a company, what would that be and why given what you know now?

Othman Laraki: That’s a great question. i mean i think First of all, I won’t say the obvious things that are based on just like pure market hindsight. right like It’s kind of like, oh, you know join Google, you know things like that.

Alejandro Cremades: yeah yeah yeah

Othman Laraki: that you know was like i mean i think mean a few things and you know I think one thing that’s been actually very is like um that you learn as an entrepreneur is that balance between selling and not lying.

Othman Laraki: I think, you know, it’s something that I’ve had kind of almost like, ah I felt like ah I’d always stuck to that kind of principle, but I think having more confidence around that, like I think you realize over time is that, you know, as an entrepreneur, you need to sell a vision and sell the future to people and convince them of a reality that doesn’t exist yet, but you want to achieve.

Alejandro Cremades: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Othman Laraki: And I think it’s super important to be your own, um you know, ah like filter or kind of ensuring that you stay on the right side of not over promising. And you know I i ah feel proud of the not having stayed on the right side, I think, of that over time. But I think it is also very difficult as ah as a starting entrepreneur to have that confidence. And so that’s something that think that like I think

Othman Laraki: is is very important. so I think number two, frankly, is is like by far, and people always say this, but like you know the the quality of the people you surround yourself with and the you know you know when you find you know I think through our career, we find we we we have the All of us oftentimes have the the are fortunate to run into ah truly phenomenal people. that It’s not just based on status. it’s like Oftentimes, it’s not like the most famous person or successful person, but rather you you know you you so you run into exceptional people and you know and i you know not missing every opportunity you can to

Othman Laraki: you know stay close to them and do work with them and learn from them and so on. I think those are um some of the you know core lessons. Actually, maybe the last one I would put in is that um you know I think as a you know in hindsight, everyone talks about grit and about you know you know, sticking to it, et cetera. um I think one of the things that I feel, especially my i every startup, I feel I’ve learned more and more is that, you know, there’s a difference between, you know, intensity, determination, and focus.

Othman Laraki: and but also learning from the signals that you’re getting from the world. I think as an as a young entrepreneur, at least that was my case, I feel I had a lot of ego and a lot of, you know, I felt like people who disagreed with my idea, et cetera. um I took that personally and, you know, and and I still do a little to some extent, but like, but oftentimes you realize that, you know,

Othman Laraki: Most people, like 99% of people around the world, like really have no agenda to offend you or to be in your way. um And people’s reactions and the reaction you get from the world and the market is extremely valuable signal. And it’s really worthwhile to really as much as you can try to incorporate that. And it doesn’t mean just like, again, like follow the wind blowing every way over which in way, but to not dismiss the signal that you’re getting as people just being stupid or just not getting it. If they’re not getting it, it’s your problem, it’s your fault. And I know i think as ah as a young entrepreneur, I felt like, at least for me, and you know i’m and i you know I’m sure it’s shared by others, but like you it’s hard to dissociate yourself from your ideas. um and two So I feel that’s actually like, you know the more I learn over time, the more comfortable I get with

Othman Laraki: pivoting and updating my beliefs ah in a more nimble way. And I think that’s actually one of the things that experience gives is actually, um it’s not about being right earlier. ah for For the first time, I think you’re actually, you’re just you get much more turns of the clock because you learn a lot more quickly, I think, from from what you from what you see. And so I feel that’s one of the the biggest lessons.

Alejandro Cremades: So for the people that are listening, Othman, I would love to reach out and say hi. What is the best way for them to do so?

Othman Laraki: um you can i Actually, the easiest way is on Twitter. My Twitter handle is just ottman with my first name, Twitter. My DMs are open, so feel free to DM me. um You can also reach out to me on LinkedIn. My SLA on LinkedIn is much worse, so but on Twitter, it’s ah very easy to to reach me. I guess I should get used to calling it X, but yeah.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well hey othman thank you so much for being on the deal maker show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us.

Othman Laraki: ah Thank you for having me. Real pleasure ah to connect and drop me a line next time you’re in the Bay Area.

*****

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