Joseph Mocanu: PHD MedTech Founder, Global Healthcare VC & Emerging Manager Investor Myths - E477

Joseph Mocanu, Managing Partner at Verge HealthTech Fund, and Jeremy Au discussed:

1. PHD MedTech Founder: Joseph shared his educational journey from studying molecular genetics at the University of Toronto where he initially focused on aging and cancer research, to realizing the essential role of business skills in bringing scientific advancements to market. This prompted him to pursue an MBA, which catalyzed his early entrepreneurial ventures, including co-founding a medical device startup at the age of 22, specializing in real-time brain imaging.

2. Global Healthcare VC: Joseph explains the ethos behind Verge Fund - impactful health technologies that enhance accessibility and efficiency in underserved emerging markets. The fund's global approach is not just about investment but also about spotting great founders regardless of product-market fit.

3. Emerging Manager Investor Myths: He explains the importance of patient capital and strategic foresight in venture capital, especially crucial in the volatile healthcare sector. His experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 illustrate the challenges of fundraising amidst global economic uncertainties. Reflecting on his dealings with different healthcare systems, he notes the significance of tailoring investment strategies to local healthcare environments.

Jeremy and Joseph also discussed emerging fund manager dynamics, investment hurdles during economic downturns, and the challenges facing global investment strategies.

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(01:51) Jeremy Au:

Good morning.

(01:52) Josepch Mocanu:

Morning. How's it going, Jeremy?

(01:54) Jeremy Au:

Good. I'm really excited to have you in the show. I think you're one of the few people who are really solid on healthcare investing globally. And so I'm really excited to share your story.

(02:03) Jeremy Au:

Joseph, could you share about yourself?

(02:04) Josepch Mocanu:

Sure. So really quickly, for those who haven't seen me, it's probably a lot of people. I'm Dr. Joseph Mocanu. I'm the cofounder and managing partner of Verge Health Tech Fund. We're not your normal venture fund. We are early stage, global, and we invest in what we call impactful health tech, which is technology that can really move the needle for addressing accessibility, affordability, efficiency, and quality for health. And we want to do this for everyone, not just people who are in more privileged positions and wealthy countries. We really want to invest in things that are relevant for everyone across, emerging markets, across underserved communities. And I've personally been doing this for six and a half years and before that, I was an angel investor in the same space.

(02:48) Jeremy Au:

You went through quite a lot of school. So you did your undergrad, you did your master's and you did a PhD, and also it was healthcare related. Could you share your thought process during that timeframe?

(02:58) Josepch Mocanu:

Honestly, it was a bit of an accidental journey. Initially I had wanted to become a scientist cause I realized, we get old and we get sick. I had started programming games from a really young age. And for a time I thought that's what I was going to do for a living but you know, when that thought upon me thought, okay, well, I should probably do a different kind of coding, so ACGand T, went to do my undergrad in molecular genetics. Thought that, gene editing and genetic engineering was gonna be the future. And that's how I was gonna contribute meaningfully. I was initially interested in what made us old, the aging process. However, when I wanted to pursue my PhD, and this was, years ago, there wasn't a lot of funding or interest in that area, but where there was a lot of interest was cancer, which some people can see as the cousin to aging. Some say that we have senescence to prevent cancer from forming. So that's what I ended up doing for my PhD and all of this was at the University of Toronto.

It was actually my side hobby or a side gig to do a bit of computer programming for a medical doctor that led to my first entrepreneurial endeavor in the healthcare space and the realization that it's not enough to have invented something, innovative or helpful. You actually have to have business acumen and network to get that innovation out there. And that is the one thing I learned from this entrepreneurship journey simply because I was so terrible or rather ignorant at it that, I had to learn all these lessons the hard way. And it was that realization of the importance of business that led me to get my MBA afterwards and starting my professional career after.

(04:35) Jeremy Au:

I think what's interesting is that, you started out this science perspective and then you did your MBA, but you also chose to do a PhD as well. So what was your decision there?

(04:45) Josepch Mocanu:

Well, to be a scientist, having a PhD, at least back in the, back in the day, a couple of decades ago was certainly a prerequisite. So it was the default path. And I think that probably what would have been helpful at the time is to understand all the different paths you can pursue with, and after a PhD.

A lot of doctoral students think academia is default, and there was a huge supply demand imbalance. There's way too many PhD candidates and PhDs for the amount of faculty positions available. That caused a lot of confusion and unnecessary angst. It was something I also faced. I had a big choice. Do I continue with academia or do I do this startup venture? But a lot of PhD students, hit the end of their PhD, and they're like, what do I do? so, it's an interesting journey, although a bit of a tangent from this conversation.

(05:33) Jeremy Au:

And so after that, you decided to become a director of research and development. Could you share about that decision?

(05:39) Josepch Mocanu:

Well, that was the startup, so, I had co founded this medical device startup that did real time brain imaging using EEGs with this medical doctor who is 20 years my senior. And I guess I was maybe a little bit too young to be considered a peer in that sense. I was only 22 years old when this startup actually, started to happen. So yeah, it was a nice title for a 22 year old.

(06:01) Jeremy Au:

Okay, so there you are building a startup and then what was some decisions you made afterwards? You went on to travel around the world and China and Singapore. So can you walk me through that time period as well?

(06:12) Josepch Mocanu:

Yeah, absolutely. So the world trip, and this was something I highly recommend. If you have, if you have the ability to do it at least once in your life. I put on a backpack and I went to 21 countries over the course of six months I did it because I thought I needed some time to decompress after finishing my PhD. At the same time with my startup we were starting clinical trials and because I was you know Basically doing the coding and designing of the product I wasn't really needed So I could safely step away You know, occasionally check my emails if something was important.

And actually it's interesting back then. It doesn't seem like it's all that long ago, 2007, you still had to use internet cafes to get a lot of stuff done. And I had one of the earliest Titan, which was a small computer. You could slide the front panel open and it revealed a keyboard and it ran on Windows series. So It was pretty good for staying in touch even way back then. I had a lot of thinking to do. Do I continue with the startup or do I try to pursue this academic by doing a postdoc and all that sort of stuff? And actually during my travels, I did have a couple of outstanding postdoctoral applications going. So I wanted to have some proper time to myself, see the world, love some steam and think about what I really want to do with myself.

(07:26) Jeremy Au:

What was the answer to what you want to do with yourself after that?

(07:29) Josepch Mocanu:

I'll stick with the startup and I did that for another year or so. And then that's when I had this realization that I really need to study business. And it's funny cause I knew so little about business that I thought you could study it. I thought you could do an MBA, get top of the class and suddenly boom, you're good at business.

Now luckily midway through my MBA, I made that realization and started realizing that it's about practicing business and it's about connections. I luckily, networked with a few people. And one of those ended up being a very good connection that took me to the next step of my journey, which was working in Shenzhen for a boutique asset manager who was investing in foreign listed Chinese companies and using management consulting techniques to try to add value to them. And that is what got me into consulting, which led me to angel investing, which led me to Verge.

(08:17) Jeremy Au:

Yeah. So I think the next chunk of your career, you started becoming a serious consultant and you were at Oliver Wyman doing consulting on life sciences and digital health. Could you share more about that?

(08:26) Josepch Mocanu:

Yeah. So this was my first quote unquote real job. It was interesting because I had seen what management consulting can do during business school. I had no real appreciation of what it actually did. I just felt like it was a bunch of suits, thinking in bullet points and basically following that over quoted trope that consultants just steal your watch to tell you the time. But this is where I saw the actual strategic thinking and the ability to create value in action because, these guys were making private equity type investments, in these listed companies.

And we saw the stock price go up as a result of these strategic actions that actually worked. So I thought it'd be great if I did this in English and nothing about health care. So that's that's that's why I thought it was a logical step. Now, I thought i'd only be doing it for one or two years so I could learn the basic consulting toolkit and then get back to investing. It was really interesting work and I have to say the pay was also pretty good too and it wasn't a linear growth in salary. It was like banking and consulting are known for having their non linear pay scales, which was really nice. So I was doing R&D strategy for global pharma and biotech companies at their headquarters.

So I started in Toronto office because I'm Canadian, but I never did a single Canadian project. I was on an airplane Sunday night back Thursday three and a half years And then I get a call from another Jeremy, who's living in Singapore, who said, Hey would you like to move to Singapore and help me start and grow the healthcare practice in Southeast Asia? I had gone to Singapore during my business school because I heard there's a lot of really interesting things happening. Biopolis had just been built and I really, really enjoyed it. I never thought I'd ever live there so when I had the opportunity to move to Singapore, it was like a nanosecond type of decision and I do not regret it for one moment. I am, thoroughly pleased that opportunity came up 10 years ago and I've never looked back.

(10:13) Jeremy Au:

So you moved to Singapore in Southeast Asia and there you spent another chunk of time doing consulting projects, but eventually you chose to become a venture capital fund manager. So could you share a little bit more about that transition that you said, Hey, consulting isn't it for me, but I'm going to the next thing.

(10:28) Josepch Mocanu:

Absolutely. It's really, again, another accidental story. When I first moved to Singapore, one of my mentees doing a women's health startup in Canada asked me if I wanted to invest in her startup, and now having enjoyed a bit of tax arbitrage in Singapore, I suddenly had money that I had the capability of investing, whereas it was very difficult to accumulate savings when your marginal tax rate's 58%. I invested in this company. I thought that kind of a neat feeling. And so I realized, maybe I can do more of this. In parallel, I had met all these really great founders through my consulting work when my clients were looking for partners to, do more with on the education, delivery technology and financing side, because, my clients were very good at making pharmaceutical products, but all of that other stuff was like alien territory to them.

However, all of these startups, which I had met during my client work were not at the scale where they could meaningfully engage in work with these global multinationals. So as a consequence, they needed to raise some money. They needed capital to buy time, to see these pilots through, to develop the offering, to scale across more than one country, but they had a heck of a time raising money. It was a very difficult environment. The sole idea of startups was in startup investing was fairly new and where you would was in more of the traditional exciting areas like tech, logistics. traditional startup domains, not overly regulated, complicated, slow, super risky health technology startups.

So I thought, Hey, I got a decent salary. If I lose my money trying to help these founders achieve their dreams two weeks later, as if magic occurs, more money appears in the bank account, this thing called a paycheck is something that is really easy to get used to. So I started investing then eventually became the first investor in companies. And one day made the realization that I enjoy investing and supporting these founders dreams more than I enjoy writing PowerPoint slides or asking analysts to write PowerPoint slides that nobody really reads. So that's when I realized I need to make my hobby, my full time job. Nobody at the time was investing in the kind of early stage, global health tech that I was looking to invest in. And maybe I just wasn't, good enough at Googling cause I would have actually loved to have sent my CV to somebody who was already I had this crazy idea or crazy realization that I needed to start my own venture fund.

(12:51) Jeremy Au:

So what was it like to set up this fund?

(12:53) Josepch Mocanu:

Hurry up and wait, basically, completely a blank slate. I did not know what I was doing. I was very lucky that I had some good thought partners, good service providers. My lawyer was XMAS, was super, super helpful. We actually got the license pretty still. There was a certain amount of time cause you still had to write your business plan. You had to figure out, okay, what is venture do a little bit of primary research, talk to some of the VCs. I knew to say, Hey what do I need to watch out for? I probably should have asked a bit more advice on how to fundraise. Cause I'd never fundraised in my life and I didn't know how to ask for anything. I didn't know how to sell anything except for the occasional consulting project. And here it was, you're naked. You have no brand name, you have nothing and you have to just put yourself out there and share your vision and hope people will find it interesting and trust you to manage their capital to do a good job.

I think a lot of the deal specific items, luckily I had exposure to having invested in deals, having seen them progress to their next rounds as well, actually leading deals, even as an angel. So that part, luckily I had a bit of experience on, but in hindsight, it probably would have been a good idea to work for a venture fund to at least understand the whole life cycle. I mean, fast forward, six and a half years later, we have 23 portfolio companies across our funds. It seems to have worked out okay, but there are probably many parallel realities where I'm dead in the ditch somewhere.

(14:13) Jeremy Au:

What's it like to be an emerging fund manager?

(14:16) Josepch Mocanu:

Pretty terrible. You may have noticed, it's not the best time to be in the venture space, either as a startup or as a fund manager, thanks to the. Sudden drying up of liquidity and interest in the asset class, which I do hope is coming back. We saw the fed just cut the interest rate by half of a percent.

So that's encouraging and in the right direction. It's not an asset class that a lot of people are all that familiar with. So when they want to go into venture as an asset class. They'll look for an established manager, someone on a fund four or fund five, or someone even more recognizable, like, Sequoia or, NEA or someone.

You essentially are a startup yourself. And I think the sooner you realize that you're a pre seed startup and think like a pre seed startup and think about how you raise your money as a pre seed startup versus thinking ham and investor. The sooner you make that realization, the easier it's going to become for you, because then you know who you need to go after and you know how you need to pitch. Don't waste your time with institutions. And unless you're really close to, family offices, don't waste your time there either. It's really the same sort of investors that would invest in a pre seed startup.

(15:23) Jeremy Au:

And you made the decision to go for this thesis, which is like, global and healthcare, right? Which is, I think, a unique thesis, as you shared earlier. Could you share about why you did this, because you've always been passionate about healthcare. But what's it like to position that thesis for people who may not be as familiar, or may be familiar, but not clear about venture capital as a way to invest into this space?

(15:43) Josepch Mocanu:

Yeah. There are global healthcare funds. I think what made us quite different is that we're a global, early-stage impact fund. And when I mean early, I mean we could be the first check into the company or even spin it out of a university. That part's a little bit difficult and non obvious. If you've got a billion AUM It's very easy to be global. You just open an office in every place you want to open an office in. For me, it was a bit of an accidental discovery And truth be told, I ran out of targets to angel invest in, in Southeast Asia. Then I started sending my wife, who's an ex tech entrepreneur, ex Apple, it's all these tech conferences cause I was too busy directing or making PowerPoint slides for my pharma clients to step away and go to places like Finland for slash or Paris for hello tomorrow and so on. She went there, she has a pretty good eye for people and ideas and she would find some great founders and I would do the technical due diligence on it and we'd make an angel investment.

So we started becoming global angels first, and we were the very first investor in a South African startup that she had met at Slush that really said, Hey, I could actually lead global deals as well and realizing that there is this really powerful notion that where an innovation is needed isn't necessarily where it's born. So this idea arbitraging from a global pool of opportunities and talent to where something is really needed was the first basis. And then the other thing we realized is that valuations in South Africa are a lot cheaper than valuations in Singapore. The South African Rand is really weak so if we invest in US dollars, they're not going to run out of money for two years. kind of sounds like we're de-risking the opportunity a little, seeing a lot of these geographical differences.

And I used to joke that it was scrappy entrepreneurs in environments where there are crappy investors are probably the best opportunities for geographic arbitrage. You just hope that the next round is going to be somewhere else. That's what got me to be a global investor. It was really accidental. And when Ed and I were thinking about the thesis for the first fund, this came as a really nice opportunity to try to systematize what, my angel investments have been doing accidentally.

(17:39) Jeremy Au:

What's interesting is that, as you do this you've obviously made also two sets of decisions, right? One is different geographies as you made those investments. And then of course, there are also different verticals within healthcare as well. Maybe we'll talk about geography first. So when you started out in Southeast Asia and Singapore, and then you went for international, what are some of the differences that you've noticed geographically on healthcare space?

(18:01) Josepch Mocanu:

Healthcare system is different. Every single one. And in fact, your healthcare system might be different between two hospitals on opposite sides of a river, let alone countries. However, they have archetypes. And you have some systematic inefficiencies. You have some systematic problems that are common across almost pretty much every single healthcare system.

The other thing I realize is that there are sovereign risks involved with certain geographies and you can mitigate those risks by re domiciling the company somewhere safer. But you can't, you can't mitigate a hundred percent of the risks. Luckily, in my angel journey, that never really came up, but the pain of redomiciling something later versus the pain of doing it immediately when the company's simpler and earlier was really clear. So that's something that at Verge, we apply quite religiously that we think that it's important to redomicile the company to somewhere safer you do it sooner versus later. And in fact, you almost do it as a prerequisite completing the deal and we did this several times in our portfolio I think that it is difficult to commercialize a health tech company overseas before you succeed in your own market so important to get that out of the system, but also as early as you can do another market.

(19:14) Josepch Mocanu:

So at least you internally understand that not everything looks the same as your healthcare system. And it gives you that neuroplasticity from a very early age in your startup to be a global company, unless your sole purpose is to be the leading telemedicine provider in Bangladesh. I mean, that's, that's enough, 160 million. But if you're a market of 3 million or 4 million, it is super important to get a bit more exposure in other markets from an early time. And we've passed on a lot of investments that didn't seem to want to do that but the health systems, differ based on, their pathway dependency, like how were they set up?

What was the overall underlying philosophy of setting up a health care system? How is it paid for? What is that balance between conservatism and safety and innovation in your regulations and also in your adoption? How many layers of decision making are there at, say, the hospital level versus primary care level? How sophisticated are the payers, both public and private? And these all differ by geography greatly, and they'll even differ between neighboring countries, and in some of the archipelago nations, they'll differ between even provinces. Once you have enough archetypes, you can figure out, okay, we should use this playbook to go after this market. Or, we realized that we need this local market for testing and iteration, but honestly, we need to get out of here as soon as possible to make this thing successful.

(20:30) Jeremy Au:

The second piece is that, healthcare is a very big space. So there are multiple different verticals within that, right? So there's diagnostics all the way to the clinical trial space infrastructure. So how do you think about this? How do you even, have a framework for these verticals.

(20:46) Josepch Mocanu:

Yeah, I think the underlying North star is, how are we going to impact as many people as possible? How are we going to do this affordably and with maximum access and with maximum decentralization? And so where we ended up landing is, let's keep people out of the hospital hospitals are only when you're really, really, they should be only when you're really, really sick and can't do anything else because they're the most expensive and the most difficult to get access to.

As a startup or an entrepreneur as a new innovation, because everyone is so busy and there are a lot of dollars in layers from, entry to exit. So we wanted to focus more on the primary care or community health or health at home or health at the workplace and on detection and prevention and screening. That involves a lot of diagnostics, clinical grade IOT devices that are all inexpensive. That can really keep you out of the hospital. And then the other one is, if you do have to go to the hospital and you're discharged, you don't want to go back. So how do you, monitor yourself remotely?

How do you manage your chronic disease remotely to be able to ensure that you don't go back or you don't get worse? they say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So we we adopted that sort of focus and if you look at what is actually killing us in the world the most It is all of these non communicable chronic diseases or the quote unquote lifestyle diseases that will kill you slowly over decades as opposed to kill you really quickly like a really severe infection or accidents or trauma you not to be said that infectious diseases are still a very large contributor to our global disease burden is. But honestly, NCDs are now more than half. And within Asia, it's over three quarters of the disease burden. And hospitals are just not built to do that.

(22:26) Jeremy Au:

Does that mean that you're more interested in chronic disease or is there different approaches that you're looking at it?

(22:31) Josepch Mocanu:

Certainly, the non-communicable or chronic diseases are a primary focus for us. If you look at the top three killers, what is it, cancer, stroke, heart disease in pretty much every single country on the planet earth, like regardless of whether it is emerging or developed, those are the three top killers. So that is clearly an area for us. If we really want to move the needle for millions of people that we ought to focus on.

(22:51) Jeremy Au:

So now here you are, having done this whole experience, what are some reflections or learnings that you've had about this as a VC in healthcare across the world?

(23:03) Josepch Mocanu:

This will sound very cliche. It's still the team. You can have the best deep tech, the best sensor, the best approach, but at least at the stages that we're investing in, not in public companies that, are supposed to run themselves with their strong systems, but even still leadership and team is important there.

Although, Warren Buffett says that he only wants to invest in companies that can run themselves I'll take an A team and a B product over a B product and a team any day of the week, any day of the year that is so important. And understanding the motivations and really appreciating just how difficult it is and the sacrifices that founders make, which it can be a 10 to 15 year journey in some cases. It's nowhere near as fast as your typical B2B SaaS startup journey would be. I think patience is probably the most important thing that I've learned from this whole journey. I think I was a quite impatient person before starting this.

(23:50) Jeremy Au:

Why is patience needed?

(23:52) Josepch Mocanu:

Patience is needed on all fronts. If you think about what a VC actually does, and I think a lot of people think that VC is just about finding and investing in startups. Honestly, that feels like it's 5% of the job. You have to have patience waiting for factors outside of your control, be it your lawyers doing certain or transactions. These days, licensing takes a while. The fundraising process, that whole dance with an investor who you've never met before, or maybe it was introduced to you lightly by a friend or another investor, building that relationship to the point where they want to write a seven figure amount of money into your fund, where they don't have a say how that money is allocated, that's generally a long process.

You're investing really early in startups, as I mentioned earlier, it can be a 10 year journey. And there might be three or four years where you don't see anything happening. I had the privilege and curse of starting a venture fund during the first global pandemic in a hundred years. I think having faith in the process, despite the world being shut down for two years was something quite interesting. When I was raising my first fund, I had wonderful commitments at January, 2020 by June, 2020, if they hadn't wired the money to the fund yet, they didn't exist anymore.

And basically having to restart that fundraising process in the midst of the pandemic was really interesting. There was a, how should I say, like a halo effect of, Oh my God, we need digital healthcare technologies cause none of us are getting any sort of care, but counterbalanced by, I have no idea when this ends. I run a business. My revenues are zero. I have to make payroll. So I can't invest in your adventure here or even doctors, even private physicians. We're having some difficulties because it's like, okay, I have a nice car, house, kids in private school. I need to pay off. I used to make two million dollars a year in consultations. My expenses are one and a half million a year. I make zero in consultations, but I still have to pay a million and a half a year in expenses. What do I do? So it was a really interesting time.

Patience is important there. You can't rush certain things. If you're a regulated entity, you can say, Hey, I'm in a hurry. I really want to help people. I want to do this stuff, but the FDA is going to be like, well, whatever you're still in the queue, good luck, unless you're doing something that's absolutely breakthrough and they did create, to their credit, the breakthrough device designation, which is absolutely great. So again, there are a lot of things that are out of your control. At the same time, when you think about how much of investing is pure luck, and how many things can actually go wrong, you learn patience.

(26:13) Jeremy Au:

On that note, are there any reflections or thoughts about myths or misconceptions that people may have about healthcare VC investing?

(26:22) Josepch Mocanu:

Well, healthcare VC investing is really, really broad. I mean, healthcare investing in VC can mean investing in brick and mortar services. It can mean investing in biotech, drug discovery, invasive medical devices, diagnostics, and, health IT systems. So it's very, very broad. And when people see us and they think about health tech, they think, Oh, I've already got decent exposure because I invested in this biotech fund, but health tech and biotech are extremely different just as biotech is different from building hospitals and clinics.

So I think probably our area of health tech, which is really around trying to prevent, trying to detect things, and then having platforms to try to deliver these technologies and utilize the data to make the detection smarter is something that is relatively new. And I would, I would dare say underappreciated in our sector that is changing. And I think you've seen a lot of false starts in the US you've had some spectacular, or I should say SPAC-tacular failures in the health tech space, but I do think as I've humorously illustrated is a result of the vehicle, not the result, or rather the result of the security type, as opposed to the result of the technology.

I mean, if you give a company gobs of money way before they're ready for it, and then somehow expect them to magically turn into profits and high growth, you're in for disappointment. That's what we saw with all these SPACs. And I actually can't think of a single SPAC that was successful across any sector. Maybe there is, and maybe someone in the audience will send a show note to say, Hey, this SPAC was successful. But I've not been able to find any to date. So I think that that's a primary consideration. We will start to see our first Asian IPOs in health tech pretty soon. I don't want to comment publicly on which but I know of two that are going to IPO next year. So hopefully that'll create some positive buzz to say This can actually work. We've got some emerging success stories here in Singapore that I hope in the coming years will embolden entrepreneur, how should I say, want to be entrepreneurs who are sitting comfortably in their current jobs to say, Hey, if that guy or a girl can do it, so can I. Let me do it. And I think that'd be a really positive force in our ecosystem.

(28:22) Jeremy Au:

Could you share about a time that you personally have been brave?

(28:25) Josepch Mocanu:

Well, don't want to belabor the point, but starting a VC fund is super hard. So people have told me I've been brave for starting a VC fund with no fund management experience and trying to do a maximally difficult thesis. I'll actually defer that. I won't say I'm brave there. I was naive and quite ignorant. You could paint a story and say that was brave in hindsight. I think probably one time I was brave was going on my first backpacking trip at the age of 17 in a faraway land where I didn't really know too many people and it was Scandinavia and that kicked off my desire to see the world and to meet strangers and just be be vulnerable.

And yeah, I mean there are probably parallel realities, again, where I've ended up dead in a ditch because I trusted the wrong person. But I think in hindsight, it was probably the one of the most important things I did growing up.

(29:08) Jeremy Au:

Why do you think that was important?

(29:12) Josepch Mocanu:

To have time for myself, to have the ability to freely explore, to see new cultures, to really force myself in a position of having an open mind, because you can't just go and not interact with people if you're in a strange land. And, you have to eat, you have to sleep somewhere, you have to go somewhere. You'll meet some really interesting people along the way. And you'll learn some really interesting things about yourself and about humanity.

(29:34) Jeremy Au:

What have you learned about humanity?

(29:36) Josepch Mocanu:

Fundamentally good.

(29:37) Jeremy Au:

Big words. How so?

(29:38) Josepch Mocanu:

Well, I probably wouldn't be here the opposite were true.

(29:41) Jeremy Au:

On that note, I'd love to wrap things up by sharing the three big takeaways I got from this conversation. So first of all, thank you so much for sharing about your PhD career and how you were on the default path of becoming a scientist. And you did become a scientist, but you chose to become basically early stage founder or founding team in terms of the research and science.

Number two, thank you so much for sharing about your decision to set up a healthcare fund about how you set out really focusing on the management consulting side, learning the business traveling around the world between China, Singapore and Canada, and then eventually building out the venture capital fund as a emerging fund manager on global healthcare.

And lastly, thanks so much for sharing about your learnings about investing in healthcare across the world. I thought it was fascinating to hear about that. First of all, the nuance between the fact that different countries have different healthcare systems and different regions have different healthcare systems. And so being thoughtful about that is important. And secondly, thinking through the various investment thesis or verticals within healthcare is such a key part of the business. And thinking through how to fundraise in the midst of a pandemic has also been quite enlightening as well. On that note, thank you so much, Joseph, for sharing your experience.

(30:46) Josepch Mocanu:

Thanks so much Jeremy for having me.