Welcome to mid-week bites. We’re here going the extra mile to help you impress all those MD’s before Labor Day weekend.

Yo, so get this. Novo Nordisk is making so much money by selling Ozempic that its market cap ($419B) actually exceeds its home country’s GDP (Denmark - $406B). They’ve had to convert so many Dollars to Danish Krone that it’s affecting interest rates.

We too, have desires here at Strategic Bites to make infomercials that will move the needle on the interest rates of our economy.

In the meantime, let’s churn out some mediocre emails.

Notes

Did we mention we’re on Instagram? We’ll post some BTS stuff and how something makes it into the newsletter, thought process, etc.

Don’t look at the ‘What AI Made this week’ section…it’s truly disturbing.

Would you like an appointment with that?

Over the course of the last 36-48 months, we’ve seen big moves in the healthcare space re: big technology firms.

• Amazon: Bought One Medical earlier this year and launched RxPass (a subscription aimed at buying generic prescriptions at a low price)

• Apple: Doubling down on personal health (Apple Watch) and their hardware is becoming ubiquitous in major health systems.

• Walmart: Aiming to open up several new ‘health centers’ all across the southern U.S in 2024

What’s going on? WE’RE HERE TO EXPLAIN, SILLY!

Mental Model time!

1. You’re the CEO of a well established company. You’ve been in business for years. You’re doing…okay. Making innovations here and there. The stock is moving along nicely.

2. Shareholders ask you what the 5 year time horizon looks like. What do you say? Incremental innovations? An uptick of 2-4% a year in the stock?

3. No! You’ve gotta outperform the market. You need growth…you need a new idea and a whole bunch of people that are willing to spend money when that idea becomes reality.

And that’s where all of this really comes in. You have to ask: where’s the next explosion of growth going to come from in the next 5-10 years?

Answer: “Undisrupted”* industries.

Examples? Education. Infrastructure…and you guessed it, Healthcare.

*Undisrupted meaning that large swaths of the industry have been left unencumbered by “big tech” thinking, or maybe that it’s an industry without a one-size-fits-all solution

What to say to the boys right after stand-up:

Having non-traditional players come into a space can be beneficial. They can look at big problems with a fresh perspective, and get to work without the industrial fatigue weighing down on the firm.

Larger mega firms looking to ‘win’ and consolidate the healthcare industry won’t be successful. Maybe they’ll have successful parts of the healthcare industry (like prescription drugs, patient-care platforms, etc.), but no firm is going to dominate and become a beloved national provider of care. This Amazon/One Medical mix-up? Not a winner.

Why? A few reasons:

1. Hard to scale: There are an infinite amount of players when it comes to patient care. Coordinating, centralizing, and making patient data/triage accessible has been the bane of a crap ton of healthcare startups

2. Managing risk and associated costs re: patient is a deep-seated domain that is hard to learn

3. Margins do not make sense: Net margin across the industry? ~2ish%

Your favorite podcasts keep touting healthcare/big tech, and frankly we don’t even know what that means anymore. All we know is that it’s not going to happen.

What AI made this week

After-party

A couple of you have requested previously on how we lay out weekly topics. Well, half the time it’s just on a notebook.

Have a great week!

Ahmed and Peter