Darden Founders
Batten Institute – Darden Founders - Ayush Bharti
Ayush Bharti (MBA ’14)
Improving Health Care in Emerging Economies: Q&A with Ayush Bharti, Co-Founder and CTO of OurHealthMate
Ayush Bharti (MBA ’14)
Co-founder and CTO OurHealthMate
San Francisco, California
OurHealthMate is a health-care technology company with a digital platform providing comprehensive, 360-degree wellness programs and tools embedded with real-time analytics to corporations. It is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Singapore and Bengaluru, India.
Ayush Bharti graduated from Darden in 2014 with an ambitious goal. Having lost family to medical negligence, he wanted to improve the health-care system in his native India. Now, with his health-tech startup, OurHealthMate, a technology platform that connects patients, providers and payers in developing economies, he’s doing just that all across India and beyond. Joining us at the Darden Founders Project, Bharti reflects on the Darden experience, Darden faculty, his stint in the Incubator Program at Darden’s i.Lab – and the vital importance of a good laugh.
Sean Carr: Thank you for joining us today on Darden Founders Project. Tell me about OurHealthMate.
Ayush Bharti: In emerging countries, specifically in India, which is OurHealthMate's first market, the employer pays for health insurance. However, insurance kicks in only when a person is hospitalized for more than 24 hours, and anything before that you pay out of pocket. So OurHealthMate provides an enterprise platform that helps employers administer and manage employee health care.
Sean Carr: How big is OurHealthMate and where do you stand in your trajectory?
Ayush Bharti: A year ago, our team had 12 members, and today we have 53. We split between San Francisco and Bangalore, India, and we have a number of large multinational companies as clients. We are in the growth stage, and we’re expanding rapidly. We’re still working primarily in India, looking at the top eight cities where you have almost 80 percent of the population that’s working for large multinationals, but we’re also looking at the Philippines.
Sean Carr: What's the founding story for OurHealthMate?
Ayush Bharti: My co-founder started working on the idea in 2013, when I was still at Darden. He was visiting Charlottesville, and we started talking about the Indian health care ecosystem and comparing that with our experience in Singapore, where we both grew up and went to school.
Before Darden, I was working at Credit Suisse, designing and developing its benefits platform, so I brought that experience to those conversations. Instead of focusing on the patient-provider relationship, we started focusing on the payer-provider relationship, because often the payer and the patient aren't the same. In India the payer is almost always the employer. We decided to solve the needs of the employer first, help control that flow of money, and make that process easier for the employer.
Sean Carr: I know that you came to Darden as a Batten scholar. Can you reflect on how your Darden experienced influenced what you're doing now?
Ayush Bharti: One reason I was attracted to Darden is because I wanted to start a health-care company. I had a couple of ideas I wanted to explore. I ended up taking a lot of strategy classes that helped me build a process around, How do you tackle larger problems, how do you break them down? That skill helped us when we were having those conversations with my co-founder around, Let's look at this whole health-care ecosystem, which is super complex. Let's look at the different stakeholders and where the best point of entry is. In addition, I was part of the i.Lab, where I worked on a fintech company. It didn't go anywhere, but the experience was useful and so was building relationships with all the people in the i.Lab.
Sean Carr: Is there any particular person you remember well, either faculty or anyone else who had a lasting influence on you?
Ayush Bharti: [Darden Professor] Saras Sarasvathy has had a huge impact on my career. The work she's done is really inspirational. I was a little pessimistic, because a lot of my friends who wanted to get into entrepreneurship had concerns about paying off student loans and making ends meet. And Saras’ optimism helped me realize that a lot of those issues can be tackled in intelligent ways and you don't have to be afraid of them.
Sean Carr: Given how far you've come, what factors or qualities are most important for entrepreneurial success?
Ayush Bharti: Working on OurHealthMate, I realized that the most essential currency you have in the startup is the people you hire and surround yourself with. Often, those are the people with whom you already had a relationship. Anyone who's thinking about getting into entrepreneurship should build those relationships at Darden. I still have a few close friends with whom I can jump on calls when I need advice. Having those brutally honest conversations with someone who can give you unfiltered feedback is rare, and it comes through your preexisting relationships.
Sean Carr: That's sage advice. I'm always interested in what inspires entrepreneurs. What gets you up in the morning every day?
Ayush Bharti: Having lived in both India and Singapore, I felt there was a lot more that needed to be done in India in health care, and I wanted to be on the forefront of that. I've lost family members because of medical negligence, and I wanted to fix those issues. I want to change the world, and I want to change how health care is delivered in emerging economies. But at the same time, we have 53 employees who work for us, and I also want to do right by them. They depend on us to build a platform from which they can start their careers and provide for their families.
Sean Carr: Your bio mentions that you like watching standup comedy and joking with friends and strangers. Who’s your favorite standup comedian and what role does laughter play in your life?
Ayush Bharti: Jon Stewart is someone I used to watch religiously, and I still do sometimes. Laughter cuts through all the noise in the world and lets you reach people with whom you might completely disagree. It’s a tool I use a lot in life personally and with my team at OurHealthMate. For example, when we approached the first hospitals we wanted to bring onboard, we were laughed out of meeting rooms, “You’re too small, you have no business being here.” So we learned to laugh at ourselves and use humor to cut through that pushback. I can't imagine what life would be like without standup comedians in this weird, weird time we live in.