Our guest today is Adegoke Olubusi. Goke is co-founder and CEO of the healthtech startup Helium Health, based in Lagos, Nigeria. He’s a Johns Hopkins University alumnus, and was previously an engineer at eBay, PayPal and Goldman Sachs in the U.S. He served on the founding team of Africa's leading social network with 30 million+ users, and received multiple honors and awards, including from Forbes, Chevron, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin. About the host: Fadel Jaoui, an economist, started this podcast to celebrate African entrepreneurial success stories, to hear the originals and changemakers behind them, and to draw lessons to inspire many more stories across the continent. This virtuous cycle is fundamental to pool talent and investments, and ultimately create startup “unicorns” that would benefit Africa’s prosperity. Fadel is a strong advocate of entrepreneurial ecosystem building and private sector development as true engines of sustainable economic growth. And he is a firm believer in leveraging innovation and technology to leapfrog development constraints and scale up social and economic impact. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Oxford University, as well as degrees from Columbia University and the London School of Economics. He started his career in investment banking in London, and has held various positions in International Financial Institutions (views are his own).
Fadel Jaoui: Hi everyone. Our guest today is Adegoke Olubusi. Goke is co-founder and CEO of the health tech startup Helium Health, based in Lagos, Nigeria. He is a Johns Hopkins university alumnus, and was previously an engineer at eBay, PayPal and Goldman Sachs in the US. He served on the founding team of Africa's leading social network with 30 million plus users and received multiple honors and awards, including from Forbes, Chevron, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin. Goke, welcome to the show and great to have you today.
Adegoke Olubusi: Happy to be on Fadel. Thank you so much for having me.
Fadel Jaoui: Excellent. It's awesome to have you. I would like to rewind the story back to 2016. How did you and your co-founders come up with the idea of Helium Health and how did it all start?
Adegoke Olubusi: So what really happened was, at the start of 2016, I had been studying and researching on the health care crisis in Africa for the prior period. So at the start of 2016, we were very keen on the need for data, more transparent, more granular, more thorough data on healthcare in Africa. We're very keen on having that. Because we started to realize that the foundation of the issues that we were facing across the continent in healthcare was a lack of data. And I'm saying on a micro level, within the healthcare facilities, the health healthcare providers themselves, and on a macro level, when you start thinking about aggregating this data as a local state or federal government. So we could see that the core of a lot of the issues we're facing was a lack of data. The government's going to make decisions. A private facility is going to figure out how to fund their facilities or how to expand, and even foreign investors looking at the African market and the opportunity, deep opportunity in healthcare, not enough data to actually make any decisions. Pharma companies, they don't do any research, clinical trials. So it almost just feels like the continent was dark. So we start to see, look for the need for how to surface this data and what we thought we'd do at the time actually, we weren't thinking we would start a medical record software company or build all the technology that we've built now. We thought we would find a lot of good local players that we could integrate with for the sake of gathering this data and starting to surface them and make them actionable to the different stakeholders in healthcare. However, we just realized that data was not being collected at the point of care, which means as you know, if you go within facilities, clinics, hospitals, tertiary facilities, data was not being collected there because they weren't digital. They had not, everything was still happening on paper. And that's when we decided to start Helium Health. And our first mission was to establish a medical records and hospital management information system that could serve as a good first step, a good data collection tool. First of all, for these facilities, as we then start to surface the value of the data to the providers and the facilities themselves, and then on a wider scale from a public health perspective.
Fadel Jaoui: That's interesting because basically what you're saying is you have to start building the databases from the ground up. And I think I’ve seen numbers like, and correct me if I'm wrong, 90% of records are seen on paper. Is that right?
Adegoke Olubusi: That's correct. There's a long way to go, but we definitely have a good head start in getting there. And when we say on paper, we mean, not just, it's not just the medical records, the processes as well, so many things are on paper. And what that means is you have insights that you're unable to surface. You go to a large tertiary facility, you find tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of paper files there, all the insights there, all the research, all the things that are unique to us, no one's able to dig into them to discover them and they just die away there. And we're starting to change that. And we're happy about the progress we're making so far.
Fadel Jaoui: I mean, this is incredibly inefficient to say the least, but you know, the disruption of the healthcare space has been slower than other industries, but not only in Africa, also in more advanced economies. So what has been your experience in convincing healthcare providers to move to digital? Especially at the beginning.
Adegoke Olubusi: I would say, okay. So at the beginning time, okay. That was probably the, I think getting our first 5 to 10 clients was likely the hardest task that the company would ever face, because there is first the aspect where if you look at the healthcare space and the healthcare community, it's like, it's its own little ecosystem, its own little network where they don't tend to like outsiders as much. And that's why you notice that you often don't find people say we're moving from finance to healthcare or we're moving from oil and gas to help or energy. No one really goes to healthcare because it's like you spend, you know, a decade of your life working to become a doctor or working to get licensed. It's a whole community that's very unique. So breaking into that community as a bunch of young, and that's also another factor as well, right? We're decades younger than the average age.
Fadel Jaoui: Who are you guys again? Like never heard of you.
Adegoke Olubusi: Exactly like who are these kids in our hospital? And what are they trying to do? It's not even a joke. That was the reaction we got. Lots of hospital owners would look at us and say, wow, it's like they are children and trying to talk to them about how to run their hospital. And that was definitely one of the more difficult parts. There was the perspective that healthcare is kind of community where if you're not a doctor, you're not welcome there and that's entirely wrong. Because that's what we need to change. And I’ll give you one more point in this regard. Healthcare in Africa, this is one of the core issues, it is not being treated as a business, still being seen as a social service. And that's one of the reasons, that's one of the core issues that we have. When you have people setting up hospitals for sentimental reasons. Because you know, because I'm a doctor, my father is a doctor, we have a family hospital and they're not thinking about scale. And how do you actually optimize for scale? How do you optimize value? How do you increase the, you know, the things you would, if you were running a traditional business, they are not thinking about those factors, everyone suffers. Especially when they're not being held accountable to those standards. So it's, I mean the earlier parts of the company was an impossible task. And what that meant for us is that we spent every day, and this is what we do. We would get in a car and we would type, I mean, we didn't have any connections with the hospital and Google maps, and we would go hospital after hospital, after hospital. And we did this for several, several, several months. I mean, we built relationships with hundreds of different providers, across different parts of Africa. That was our life. And all the insights that we gained in the process is how we run the organization now.
Fadel Jaoui: But somehow, you're also educating the stakeholders, because when you meet them and so on, right?
Adegoke Olubusi: Absolutely. We actually like to say now, and we don't say ourselves as individuals, we say our technology knows your hospital better than you do. We like to tell the clients that it knows, it knows you and your hospital better than you do. And that's the goal of technology, that is the whole goal. It's supposed to be an enabler. And, you know, there's so much more that technology can do that people would not have been able to think of until they get to see it live. And I’ll get to share that some of that with you, as we talk further on this podcast.
Fadel Jaoui: Sure. Based on what you told me now and based on the research I’ve done on the company, you know, Helium house started as an electronic medical records platform essentially. But tell us more about the company today, i.e. You know what it does, the solutions it provides, the clients, the markets it covers.
Adegoke Olubusi: Absolutely. So, we started out, you know, building and this isn't like I mentioned, right? It wasn't our initial thesis. We never thought we'd build an electronic medical record platform. In fact, when we started, some of my good friends happened to run some of the largest electronic medical records platform in the world and in the US and they all said, the one thing you should not do Goke, we beg of you is do not start an EMR. Because these are some of the more complex software you can build. It's very incredibly far out to build, but we understood that we needed to build one that could work for Africa, that could work for our market. We needed to reimagine the way it would work. How do you, I mean, you can’t build something for Africa that requires that without considering offline compatibility, offline first approach, because power is not a stable factor, right? And internet connectivity is not something that's reliable. You can't build something that requires complex training or uses complex language or experiences. It's not going to scale. So we understood we needed to do that. And we spend a lot of time building out in the initial phase of the company, but now we essentially scaled to really focus on, I would say three core pieces of technology and solutions. First, it is a full provider management suite. So it's not just electronic medical records now, it's a hospital management information system. It is a tele clinic. It is an appointments, medical appointments booking platform. We have the whole full suite there. And then on the second hand, we have a suite of financial solutions for healthcare. This includes our Helium pay solution, where we process payments for billing and payments for providers across our network. So if you went, if a patient walked into a hospital that uses Helium, and they wanted to pay with their card, their mobile money, USSP they instantly be able to do that with Helium Pay. And we even use work with the government with Helium pay now as well. So if you are a for example, paying for a COVID test, which is now mandatory in order to fly in or out of Nigeria internationally, you would be paying through Helium pay as well. And that piece as well is the credit we provide. We have a Helium credit platform where we provide instant finance into hospitals on our network. And we do that leveraging the data we have on them automatically through the system as well. And I would say the third piece of the company is our public health focus where beyond the technology we provide to the private sector, public sector, for medical records and provider management and financing, there's a deep aspect of our work, which is around public health. Things like the COVID response tool that we built to the Nigerian government, which this year, this 2020, which serves as an end-to-end solution managing emergency response. A lot of things like that, that we do, because this is a public health conversation. And we don't believe that we would have delivered on our promise or digitize in healthcare except if the public sector and a public health aspect is covered as well. So that really is one of the core places where we draw our attention.
Fadel Jaoui: I mean, you're literally at the core of the storm, you know when it comes to the current health crisis. But we'll talk about COVID-19 a bit later on. I just wanted to get back to, you know, you mentioned finance and credit, and I find that quite interesting. So when you say providing credits to stakeholders and to hospitals, is it to purchase equipment, for example, is it like, you know...
Adegoke Olubusi: I would say, absolutely. I would say one of the core requests is equipment, asset purchase, equipment acquisition. Whether you're trying to buy new CT scan, you're trying to buy new, you know, different types of equipment, ultrasounds, which facilities need we're able to provide. But I’ll just give you an example here. You could see a facility that has a spike in, let's say they have a lot of pregnant women showing up in the hospital. What they have to do is because they don't have, they can't afford from their own capital. They don't have the capital to afford, let's say an ultrasound machine for example, they end up preparing all the patients, all the pregnant women to a lab nearby, but then there's the additional work. And the additional stress on the patient as well, the additional burden. Especially in Africa, patient has to get there. You know, they have to go back for their results. The lab may not be digital, all of these things. And then there is a lost revenue that the provider could have gained if they had the equipment. So imagine us, the partner, we automatically can see your revenues. We know your numbers because the system knows your numbers. And we also understand, we can see your volume of pregnant patients. These are real people, you know, so we're able to automatically marry that data and using an algorithm, it can tell us and tell you as well, here is you have this much of a line of credit. So you can purchase this equipment or whatever equipment you need and what that translates to is increased revenue and more value for the facility. But the problem is the hospitals and the providers do not have many sources to turn to. The alternative besides what we provide and what a few other partners like a medical credit fund, who we work with as well do, go into the banks. And no one likes banks. I mean the amount of paperwork you'd fill out and the number of things, and they always need you to collateralize things you don't have, which even gets even more ridiculous.
Fadel Jaoui: Over collateralize as well. Over collateralize.
Adegoke Olubusi: Oh, some people even, the one I find, a lot of providers who talk to us tell us this, what I find the craziest is when people are asking for cash collateral, which sometimes is equal to the amount that you're requesting. I think if I had the amount, why would I be here?
Fadel Jaoui: Why would I do that in the first place?
Adegoke Olubusi: That is the way it is in Africa and in most of Africa, there is not that good credit infrastructure. So we're very happy to be able to unlock the possibilities that come out of this.
Fadel Jaoui: That's a great angle. And since we're talking about financing, let's talk a little bit more about the financing of the company in the first place. So what were the initial sources of funding for the startup?
Adegoke Olubusi: Absolutely. So I would say, first of all, we were fortunate, and this is one of the, I would say one of the important things as well, in starting a company in Africa, because this is my third company. My first one, I started with one of my co-founders for Helium actually, who we also went to high school together with Edward, pretty successful with that in that regard. But I would say one of the fortunate things we had was that we were able to seed some of our own funding and cover the initial research, you know, the initial costs of the company. However, the other thing that helped us in order to be able to raise a seed round was Y Combinator. If we didn't have the Y Combinator access, and I'm saying this, you know, with complete honesty here, there are not many investors looking to actually invest with the capital to deploy in most of Africa. It's not like the Valley. It's not like the US and I’ve, you know, lived and worked in all of these places. You actually don't have many people deploying capital. A lot of people claiming they're raising funds without actually investing in any companies, or you have people who are looking for deals, which is, you know, by nature, it was something that I would say almost like culturally an African thing to do. You don't see a lot of people trying to genuinely back and support founders in the hardest phase. And one of the greatest fortunes we had was Y Combinator being able to see, and this is again, Silicon Valley, with the limited context they have, being able to see that there was a need for the technology that we're providing and that's because it's foundational infrastructure. If you don't have foundational infrastructure, then you can't build everything else. There is a foundation for things to be running digitally and for things to be connected and for data, then you can build on top of that. So they were able to see that opportunity that was invaluable, and that helped us signal to other investors to then join the round. And that is also one of the core parts of our fundraising, the signaling aspect. In Africa, because a lot of people, you know, do this for crowds and for different reasons. And they just, they can be followers rather than leaders, you know, we ended up being fortunate by having a lot of people join the round because of Y Combinators' interest.
Fadel Jaoui: Yeah. I mean it's a chicken and egg problem. I mean, if everybody's a follower, then who's the leader. But luckily, as you said, you participated into the Y Combinator program and for people listening, it's a prestigious accelerator based in the West coast, in the US and from my understanding, you went there in 2017, right?
Adegoke Olubusi: That's correct.
Fadel Jaoui: And so in addition to financing and that helped a lot in scaling up Helium Health, what's the rest of the experience. I think people would be interested to hear more about Y Combinator experience and what other doors it opened to you?
Adegoke Olubusi: Absolutely. I would say, first of all, what you get is a community of like-minded founders, and that is by far, Y Combinators' most valuable asset. It's not the funding they give or the helping to fundraise, it's the tapping into a network of you know, maybe I think right now would probably be about 15 plus years, or maybe 14 plus years of exceptional founders, like yourself who have worked in every possible field. So if we ever go into the internal forum for Y Combinator, I could look up, I mean, if you threw out a topic, I could look it up on the forum now, and you'd see conversations. And these conversations go on daily. It's a network of founders supporting each other. I think that's the most valuable thing. If there was any introduction you need, whether it's to an investor, to a client, any type of issue you're facing, because there have been a hundreds actually now thousands more than, I believe there are more than 2000 Y Combinator companies so far over the last 15 years, because there have been thousands of founders just like yourself who have likely gone through it in different ways, different scale, different countries, they face tax issues. And they've hired lawyers and hired teams and scaled from zero. I mean you have everyone from Airbnb and all these bigger, Dropbox, it's scaled from one to 5,000, they have all the advice and insights and access that is invaluable. I'd say at the core, that's what you'd get from a platform accelerator like Y Combinator. And the other things that also definitely help is the actual mentors and leadership there. They're exceptionally smart people who have, you know, just incredible insights and also incredible access to investors as well. And that also helps you fundraise because at the end of it all as well, there's a need for funding to actually scale the vision and get things done. And Y Combinator has been exceptional in making that happen, especially for African startups.
Fadel Jaoui: I mean, basically from what you're saying, it's intangibles, so you have information and so on, and the network and mentorship is a big deal as well. You got to keep hearing that, you know, that dimension again and again among entrepreneurs.
Adegoke Olubusi: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Fadel Jaoui: Did you have to you know, let's use the usual buzzwords, did you have to pivot at any point?
Adegoke Olubusi: I would say yes. And I’ll also say, I'd be surprised if there weren't a company, a startup, that did not. Because your hypothesis is always different from reality. And the true test of, I would say leadership and your agility as a startup, as a founding team, is your ability to adapt. So when we started out our theory, we didn't even think we'd be build an EMR, look at us now, not only did we build an EMR, we scaled beyond that. When we started out, we thought we'd sell it in towards certain crop of facilities that changed as well. Probably every thesis, every hypothesis we had changed, but the good thing is, you know, we ran this in a normal scientific process. We had a hypothesis, we tested it out and then we listened and we, what's the word? Adapted ourselves to it. So we pivot all the time, but fundamentally our goal still at the core remains the exact same, how do we help Africa? And emerging markets become more technology and data-driven in healthcare, whatever it takes to get there.
Fadel Jaoui: Yeah. You stick to your vision basically. And then you discover the unknown unknowns as you go. And as you interact with the markets, basically.
Adegoke Olubusi: Absolutely.
Fadel Jaoui: You know, you talked earlier about really the core of the company and the strengths, obviously, which is gathering data. And that's extremely beneficial to all the stakeholders, to hospitals, patients as well at the same time privacy has been a huge topic as of late across tech platforms and attracting public scrutiny. And this is more of an issue when it comes to people's health. So how are you handling this?
Adegoke Olubusi: How are we handling the topic of privacy? So I would say this, the countries that we operate in, most of Africa do not have any form of sophisticated laws around healthcare data or healthcare privacy. A lot of them are just starting to catch up. Most of them don't even have a good framework for it. So I would say we do two things. First of all, we ensure we meet global standards for healthcare privacy, healthcare interoperability, healthcare security, health care data security, we meet global standards. So we go out of our way to ensure everything we do uses the global coding standards, ICD 10, or using fire formats. We are meeting HIPAA compliance. We're not required to do these things. But we do that because we're building a global organization and there is a responsibility to each patient to ensure that there's that level of security on there. And second, we then start to work with the local legislators in each of the countries we operate in and helping them draft and craft essentially, we're lobbying to help them draft and craft their e-health strategy, a data privacy strategy, and to ensure that the standards that they hold up to are meaningfully, what is best for them. And they don't end up doing what would be a copy paste of foreign laws, as you know, that is predictably, what most people would do. This is what the US does. This is what the UK does. Why don't we copy this? No, the US isn't even happy about HIPAA and their standards. UK and most of Europe is, you know, hands in the air about GDPR. Write something that is relevant to your own country and your own context of your own people. Don't copy it. And that requires that you understand it, which tends to mean that you need people in the room who actually do have a good understanding of it internationally and locally. Unfortunately for us, we get to serve, be these people in Nigeria, and a lot of the other countries we operate in. And we also bring a lot of transparency to the process as well. I'll confess on this call on this podcast, that it is quite expensive to maintain global standards and global privacy whilst serving a market that's paying you in local currency, but not global currency. However, it is our responsibility that we have, and we're happy to continue to uphold.
Fadel Jaoui: Well, you know, at the end of the day, these other things that pay off. Number one, because, you know, and from the looks of it, I'm sure you're a principled person and your team are principled people. That's number one. And number two, it is in fact, in the long run and for the sake of sustainability of the business, it is the right thing to do, to be on the client and on the patient side.
Adegoke Olubusi: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Fadel Jaoui: Let's talk a little bit more about you now and your role in the company, cause there's the company and there's you, the co-founder. We are used narratives of startup CEOs on covers of business magazines, giving an image of a glamorous life, yachts and private jets. So what does your typical workday really look like?
Adegoke Olubusi: Okay. That's an excellent question. You know what I found? Because I do happen to have a lot, a lot of friends who are fellow founders as well. A lot of them have also been on covers of magazine, is that it feels like almost none of us, almost none of us do that, spend our time on that as much as people would think. That instance where we took that picture, or we wrote that interview is probably the only instance we spent in the last several months, not doing our work. And that is the reality of it.
Fadel Jaoui: Two seconds of glamour, two seconds of glamor.
Adegoke Olubusi: Literally two seconds. And then a decade of work. Exactly. Because the work in itself has to be fulfilling in itself in order to do it, nothing else externally can glamorize it. So really what I think about it when I wake up in the morning and I’ll give you a quick example here. When the lockdown started earlier in the year, when COVID started to become a heavier conversation around February and March, I had a sprint where I had a hundred days where I worked 14 hours every day. It was 6:00 AM to 8:00 PM every day for a hundred days. I can't even imagine how we went through that, but we needed it at the time. A lot of things we're doing, building COVID response technology. We needed to understand it, understand what everyone wasn't thinking about. So that's what the real life looks like. It is a 100 days of 14-hour days every day and then maybe a tech crunch article.
Fadel Jaoui: That's what it takes. That's what it takes.
Adegoke Olubusi: That's what it takes, because what is fulfilling in itself is the value of the work we're doing, nothing external can really fulfill that. It's just a lot of work.
Fadel Jaoui: It's important that people hear that and really understand it. And you know, another side is, it's a bit more of a, it's a longer-term aspect and it's about hiring people. So one of the most difficult tasks for an entrepreneur, especially when the company is expanding, and you need to hire top executives is choosing the right person for the right role. So what do you look for when you hire new people?
Adegoke Olubusi: Absolutely. I love this question. So first of all, by default, there is the competence topic, but I would say finding competent people is the easiest part, it is the easier part of the process. Finding people who are competent on paper is the easier part. The core thing we look for is shared values.
Fadel Jaoui: That's key.
Adegoke Olubusi: Do we share the same values here? And I’ll give you an example. If the person is trying to make a lot of money quickly, we were very transparent people. I would not advise you to work in healthcare in Africa. And I would tell you, I would even give you recommendations to other great places. Shared values are important because, because of the kind of work we do and the fact that it has real life impact on real people, we cannot afford to be distracted or to what's the word? Or to not think long-term to put our own short-term goals or our own short-term gratification over the long-term vision that we need to establish. And it's very important that everyone on the team is incentivized and aligned to that both personally and professionally. And that means that there are a lot of people who would be great to work at Helium health, who would be great to solve the problems that we're tackling within the organization. However, they're not the good fit for it. And they should, they should not work in Helium health. They should not apply or take an offer because they're not a good fit for it. There is the need for shared values. And some of the values that we cared the most about are simplicity, transparency, you know, a lot of openness, a lot of things that are uncommon when you're doing business in Africa, we publish our numbers, our revenue numbers, our customer expenses, salaries, all those things internally, everyone in the organization knows that. There are no walls because it's a shared goal that we're being accountable towards. We know the number of patients that we are, you know, records we've digitized. These are things that are very important to us. So we like that kind of system. And we try to ensure that people share that same type of value. And there's also the need for them to have some kind of genuine reason to care deeply about the continent and emerging markets. Because if they don't, very hard work, if they don't, they will get scared away, which tends to be a trend with a lot of people. Fortunately for us, I would say, I don't even think anyone in the leadership team has a left the organization, which is, you know, which is insane, you know, that we've been running it for a few years and everyone's even more excited. And the team's been scaling, it's because we really got that shared values part right.
Fadel Jaoui: And think about it, because you know, why the match is important. That's because you may have to work together for 20 years in the future. So it's not just about solving the problem now, it is about all those coming years and you have to be together working every day.
Adegoke Olubusi: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Fadel Jaoui: A different dimension is which is as important as the teams is funding. And recently Helium Health raise a total of $10 million. Congratulations, first of all, in series A funding led by top global investors, how does that change your perspective as a CEO?
Adegoke Olubusi: That's an interesting question. I would say it, you know, it doesn't, or at least, it shouldn't. It's really shouldn't change your perspective. And I’ll tell you why, the funding that you get is not your company's revenue. It is not a real indicator of success, or it is an indicator of progress, progress going on, but it's not necessarily an indicator of success because what $10 million means is that we just gave up a huge chunk of the company in exchange for cash to scale the company. That really is what it translates to. So what that means for us is two things. First of all, the need to have the internal processes to support scale, because if you're raising in a venture backed manner, then it's about scaling the work you're doing. So what happened for us is a deeper internal need to ensure first of all, that our processes, that we do have the framework to scale. That's one. Two, that we do have the people who are fit to support the scale and three, that everyone is laser focused on executing that. That really is what it means. I don't necessarily see, even though it's a great milestone, we celebrated it internally because it does take a lot of work, especially in Africa to raise funding as you know, I think it doesn't necessarily change my perspective, it just gives me a deeper responsibility and accountability on all these things. And that just means better processes, better focused people and just like laser focused on our goals.
Fadel Jaoui: Otherwise just keep going.
Adegoke Olubusi: Keep going, precisely.
Fadel Jaoui: So since we're discussing healthcare, we can't ignore the obvious coronavirus of course. So how has COVID-19 impacted the business in the past month and your sector more broadly?
Adegoke Olubusi: Definitely. So I would say what has happened with healthcare in Africa this year, it was partially, I would say COVID-19, but also, you know, it's impacted, environmental impact etc. things like lockdowns or airports are shut down in most of the countries in Africa, if not even all of them. What that meant was for the first time since likely in a place like Nigeria, the first time since likely military rule, people could not just leave the country for healthcare. Think about that, you know what the middle class and the upper middle class and the upper class rely on across the Africa? Healthcare in India and in the US and the UK, in Germany, that is what the entire healthcare sector relies on. Why build cancer centers and why build, why invest in our own resources when I can hop on a flight and be in London in five hours. That's really the mindset. Think about the politicians, the legislators who write the laws and defund healthcare, that has been the mindset. For the first time ever in their lifetimes, they have to face the reality that a lot of them might've died. And a lot of them did die because they cannot leave the country. Think about it. You have cancer, you need a certain type of care you thought you could always leave the country and here you are stuck. And that was a harsh reality for a lot of them. They started setting up isolation centers, everywhere, private isolation centers. Most of this was rich people trying to ensure they're protected in case things go South. See what I mean? What it translates to is first of all, for the first-time people have the reality to say, Oh, crap, we need to invest and double down in our healthcare sector, because we might not always have the luxury of relying on others as this year proved. And what that translates to is deeper need and deeper investments in healthcare, a deeper focus on healthcare. And I just hope that's going to be the case going forward. And we've seen that on a business standpoint, a lot of the partnerships conversations, things we've been saying for years, suddenly everyone comes back to the table open and ready to listen. And we've been saying the same things for years. So I'm hoping this is going to be a shift in the right direction. And as a business as well, we were able to support the private sector launching telemedicine, virtual care software, delivery of care to patients in different remote areas using technology. Working with the government and building the full end to end emergency response technology. All these things, we are able to support the country and the region specifically through that means, but this year has been an eye-opener for the entire continent, and we hope it's going to be continuing to push us all in the right direction.
Fadel Jaoui: I mean, let's hope that people finally admit the reality and start finally investing in healthcare, but really meaning it.
Adegoke Olubusi: Absolutely.
Fadel Jaoui: Now, thinking ahead, Goke, what big plans do you have for the future of the company?
Adegoke Olubusi: Big plans for the future. This is, you know, one of the most exciting parts for me. When I think about Helium and our mission it's really is a vision, a vision of technology and data-driven healthcare, what that means, each country is slightly different. Each African country is slightly different from the other. And what we got to do is operationalize, establish, you know, give birth to these visions and as many countries as emerging market countries as possible, that's what we got to do. And we're very excited about that. We are already expanding deeply into North Africa, East Africa, Kenya, Morocco, Algeria, and all these countries as well. We're currently, we've primarily been focused more heavily on the West Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia. But as we expand into these countries, we consolidate the efforts. We spur the same vision because it's, again, we hire local teams. We want them to understand the problem from the perspective of their country. We then tailor our solutions that we have, you know, to that, it's a very like local vision that we're giving birth to. That's the exciting plan for us and our, you know, our future just means scaling up the work we're doing and getting closer to data and technology driven healthcare. And I would like to look back in, you know, maybe it's going to be 5, 10 years from now or even longer, and be able to say, you know, we were able to contribute to the digitization of healthcare and look at how much better our lives are, you know, because of this.
Fadel Jaoui: I really wish that for you Goke. Because you've been doing incredible work.
Adegoke Olubusi: Thank you so much.
Fadel Jaoui: And the very last question I have for you so that I don't hold you any longer. What advice would you give young people starting the entrepreneurial path, just like you a few years ago?
Adegoke Olubusi: What advice would I give? I'd say two things. I would say, first of all, listen, listen, listen, listen, listen to everyone, listen to the customers. I'm not saying, you know, do whatever they tell you, but I am saying, listen, listen for what people are not listening to, listen for what people are not paying attention to. If we didn't spend, I mean, months of our lives is going hospitals or hospitals, sit with doctor after doctor actually understanding their problems, not what someone wrote on a blog post on the internet, or what perspective we have from reading reports from the world bank and the WHO, we would have been screwed. Listen, that's the first thing. Listen to everyone. That way you can form a thesis or a hypothesis that is truly unique. And I tell you, you probably will be right with that thesis because you would have gained so much insight from listening that you will be breaking the perspective that is different than people have imagined. That's the first part. The second part, which is more important than ever when you're doing business in Africa as a founder is be bold, be bold, and it's going to be an impossible task every time around. I mean, I'm a third time founder. I thought it was going to be easier. I thought fundraiser would be easier this time. Scaling would be easier, never got that easier. So you got to be bold. You got to be bold. Bold to everyone, because you are fighting a very unique set of challenges. And it takes a certain level of insanity as a person. It is a level of like crazy determination to really push things in the direction you want it to go. And if you push it, if you're consistent, if you listen, you know, you work and you keep boldly pushing, you know, and next to no time people will begin to gather and listen as well. And a lot of the things that you wanted to happen will start to happen. And that would be my advice to founders who are starting this journey.
Fadel Jaoui: Goke these were valuable insights, you're a very upbeat person. It has been a pleasure talking to you today and I sincerely wish you and the company all the best.
Adegoke Olubusi: Thank you so much Fadel. Thank you so much for having us on.
Fadel Jaoui: And to the audience listening. If you want to learn more about Helium Health, visit www.heliumhealth.com in one word. Thanks for listening. And until next time.
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