Perspectives on Healthcare Innovation and Impact at Scale
With Subject Matter Experts
Sanjiv Shah, Principal, Cambridge Healthcare Advisors
Matt Sitter, CEO, AFN
Nearly 18% of the GDP in the United States is devoted to Healthcare. In many parts of the world, aging populations and complex healthcare systems greatly impact care and countries' economies. Given its importance, understanding the impact of our approach to healthcare points the way to opportunity for improving our systems.
We think we live in a Gaussian or normally distributed world. We don’t.
The Gaussian probability distribution has “thin tails” in that large events are considered possible but far too rare to be consequential—this normal distribution is symmetrical and smoothly peaked, with a mean at the center. But many fundamental quantities follow distributions that have “fat tails,” i.e., a higher probability of rare extreme values that can have an extraordinary impact—just a single event can, at times, drive the total in a disproportionate way. Such distributions (often called Pareto Lévy stable or leptokurtic) are sharply peaked, skewed, and heavily tailed.
Most of psycho-socio-economic life is, in fact, non-Gaussian: Just about all critical phenomena in human affairs—wealth, financial returns, profits, innovations, social networks, and damages from natural disasters, to name a few—are almost entirely unpredictable and governed mainly by extreme events.
Nassim Taleb, Arthur De Vany, and Benoit Mandelbrot have written eloquently about “fat tails” and leptokurtosis. Years of reckoning with their writings and lectures have helped Sanjiv educate his intuition regarding the commercial parameters that have the potential to increase the probability of (but not guarantee) extreme impact “in the tails.”
We will discuss these sector-agnostic leptokurtic characteristics and how they apply specifically to enterprises focused on health and well-being. Building a portfolio of products, services, and businesses with these parameters across customer groups, geographies, and industries is critical to increasing the probability of improbable, high-gain tail events. Retooling or starting over may be appropriate if your enterprises do not strongly exhibit these features.
Sanjiv B. Shah
Sanjiv B. Shah is an early-stage investor focused primarily on health and well-being. He loves to ask questions, especially discontinuous ones. Whenever Sanjiv hears or thinks something, his first question frequently is, “How might the opposite be just as true or truer?” Another favorite is “Where is the delight in X (insert your product or service here)?”
During the eleven years before the pandemic, as Principal of Cambridge Healthcare Advisors, Sanjiv spent over two hundred days per year abroad advising governments and favored private enterprises on healthcare system transformation, principally in the GCC and China.
During the pandemic, he concentrated predominantly on helping young health- and well-being-focused entrepreneurs and companies spawned from local Boston universities to home in on leptokurtosis and the leptokurtic parameters, such as dematerialization, antifragility, and geographic and temporal asynchrony, that can potentially increase the probability of extreme impact “in the tails.”
As a former competitive cyclist, Sanjiv knows that well-being starts at home and that muscle is medicine, so you will find him performing six to eight hours of Zone 2 movement (2 mmol/liter of lactate) per week, weighted blood flow restriction training, and sumo deadlifts—the goal for 2024 is three times body weight or four hundred and twenty pounds.
Sanjiv earned an A.B. in Philosophy from Stanford University and an M.B.A. from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He is fluent in Italian, the most beautiful language in the world, and lives with his wife Sara, an entrepreneur focused on geriatric (85+) well-being, in Cambridge, MA. Contact Sanjiv at leptokurtosis@pm.me or 917-674-1910.
Principal, Cambridge Healthcare Advisors
Matt Sitter
Matt Sitter is a passionate believer in the power of networks to innovate and realize new opportunities. His career has focused on helping leaders grow, succeed, and to mobilize their teams, organizations, and networks.
Matt’s work has spanned a broad array of industries including Healthcare, Technology, Real Estate Investment, Consumer Products, and Finance (amongst others). He has worked with multiple Fortune 500 executive teams, Private Equity firms, startups, and everything in between.
In addition to his role at AFN, Matt is currently a partner at the Advisory Services firm, Advantary. His experience includes leadership roles at The McChrystal Group, CrossLead, Inc., and MedLever. He has led multiple functions including Product Management, Marketing, Reimbursement, and Product Development.
Matt is a certified Executive Coach, completed his undergraduate studies at Brown University and received his MBA from Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business. He is a proud father and husband.
CEO, AFN
Principal, Cambridge Healthcare Advisors