Ali Parsa is the founder and CEO of Babylon, a subscription-healthcare service that offers virtual consultations with doctors and AI chatbots. In the UK, more than 500,000 people have downloaded the Babylon app, which began trials with the NHS in 2017 and counts Citigroup and Facebook among its corporate clients. Since launching in 2013, the company has received funding from the teams behind DeepMind and Innocent Drinks and closed a $60 million (£46m) Series B round in April 2017. Before Babylon, Parsa, a former banker, ran the private healthcare provider Circle. He tells WIRED his career learnings.
"I'm grateful to my parents for putting me into primary school a year late. The difference between me and the rest of my classmates was significant in a number of ways: I was always the captain of the football team, the head of the class. That gave me a huge amount of confidence from a very young age."
"I came to the UK as a middle-class refugee from Iran in the 70s, and that was a wonderful thing. The language barrier, the money issues - they were what Malcolm Gladwell calls desirable difficulties. I learned to work incredibly hard to gain back what I had."
"During my PhD I decided to throw a huge party and borrowed £7,000 to rent an entire Greek island. A couple of weeks after we put out the publicity, the Gulf War broke out - and who's going to let any kid travel? So we hosted a reader event for The Guardian on the island instead."
"Investment banking wasn't for me. People don't understand just how hard investment bankers have to work. Even as a junior in the industry I was sometimes required to pull two all-nighters in the office every week. But it taught me that I can put in 90 or 100 hours a week and survive."
"At Goldman Sachs, my team never worked as hard as the other teams. It's simple tricks: don't do a client meeting in the morning (that way, none of your juniors have to stay up all night to produce the materials); never do a meeting on a Monday (that means your staff don't have to kill themselves over the weekend)."
"It isn't status-related. One of the reasons people become so slavish in corporations is because they are fearful of losing it all. When I was in investment banking, I was a refugee and had run a business, so when bosses said 'I'll fire you,' it just didn't wash with me.
"I was once lucky enough to have lunch with Rupert Murdoch. I asked him what advice he had for a young entrepreneur. He said forget about things that can be done with a three- to five-year budget, because there are plenty of them. But if you have a ten- or 15-year plan: nobody else is doing that idea."
"At Circle we had some amazing investors, especially hedge funds, and we had one or two investors who destroyed that business, in my view. One of the VCs was dreadful. As soon as we became successful they said we can sell, take the company public - and they made the wrong decisions."
1965: Born in Tehran, Iran
1987: Graduated from University College London
1990: Co-founded media-promotion company V&G
1995: Completed a PhD at UCL and joined Credit Suisse
2004: Founded private-healthcare company Circle
2014: Founded Babylon Health
2016: Babylon receives $25 million (£19m) Series A funding
2017: Babylon closes $60 million Series B funding
"My stupidity at Circle was not understanding the power of the board. When we took the company public, I was diluted to a level where I had no control over my own business. I was also accountable to people who, for £50,000 a year, sit on your board and have zero incentive in anything."
"A problem such as making healthcare affordable, accessible and putting it in the hands of everybody on Earth [as Babylon hopes to do] may sound stupid. But once you solve that kind of problem, nobody else is going to have the time and energy."
"Almost everyone at Babylon is an immigrant – you can't devise a better job-interview process."
"What's more important is seeking out the extreme early adopters. As an entrepreneur, what you need to do is focus on selling to the two per cent of people who adopt things extremely early. If you find those amazing trendsetters, then the size of the deal is irrelevant."
"When we came up with the idea at Babylon of creating an artificially intelligent triage system, many people just laughed and asked questions like 'What about regulations?' and 'How will you build it?' But it just made sense for our business."
"Why didn't Snap take up recent offers to sell? Because they knew what they were going to do with the company next year to grow it. I know what I'm going to do next year at Babylon to increase the company's value, so why would I sell it before then?"
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
