Leveraging your superpowers: Dr. Vineeta Agarwala of Andreessen Horowitz
Our team at Theia recently spoke with Dr. Vineeta Agarwala, previously a researcher and an operator at tech-driven healthcare companies, and currently a physician and venture investor, with a focus on biotech and health tech companies. Dr. Agarwala has seen the industry from a variety of angles, giving her a unique perspective as an investor. Presently, she continues to see patients at Stanford and is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).
Dr. Agarwala pursued her undergrad in biophysics at Stanford University and then continued her education to get her MD/PhD at Harvard Medical School and MIT. She has been a data scientist, a management consultant at McKinsey & Company, a Director of Product Management at Flatiron Health, and worked within prominent laboratories across the country. As a General Partner at a16z, she works with companies seeking to improve how drug development and patient care delivery, and she and continues seeing patients as an adjunct clinical professor in the Division of Primary Care and Population Health in the Department of Medicine at Stanford.
Major takeaways from our conversation:
Adopt a “continuous learner” mindset
“ I would describe my journey as as kind of a continuous quest to just be closer and closer to innovation that I thought could help patients.”
On a quest to learn how to look at innovation through multiple lenses, Dr. Agarwala embarked on a circuitous, but pivotal career journey. She ebbed and flowed between specialist and generalist roles, with the goal of inching closer and closer to the core of innovation.
First, she started out in academia with a focus on basic research before moving on to McKinsey next to better understand how large companies feed their innovation pipelines, through combinations of internal efforts and external partnerships. She then jumped back into academia, now to pursue an MD, to gather specialized knowledge about the healthcare ecosystem, and a PhD, to dive deeply into a particular scientific area of interest, namely the genetic basis of complex diseases.
People often ask Dr. Agarwala how she decided what to do professionally, and she argues that it was important for her to keep taking on new challenges and to accept opportunities that would enable her to reach across the borders of different industries and sectors. For example, her foray into product management at Flatiron Health was a result of Zach Weinberg, the former COO and co-founder, giving her an opportunity to try something different. Interestingly, in that role, she was able to lean on skills, such as coordination and communication, that she had acquired during medical training. With all of this, she ultimately found her way to venture investing, now as a General Partner at a16z, where she is able to partner with inventive entrepreneurs who building the future of healthcare through technology.
“…[do] not be afraid to to move between different fields and different industries…realize and embrace the fact that what you learn in one setting might actually be really relevant and a superpower in another setting.”
What Dr. Agarwala described, building deep expertise and a wide knowledge base, is this phenomenon known as being a T-shaped person, which a term IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown coined. Forbes contributor Lisa Bodell said:
…the vertical bar on the letter T represents the depth of your skills and expertise in a single field, whereas the horizontal bar is your breadth or ability to collaborate across disciplines with experts in other areas and apply knowledge to areas beyond your primary field.
Put all of your eggs in one basket
Dr. Agarwala described a blog post written by her a16z colleague, Dr. Vijay Pande, around how to think about jumping from academia into entrepreneurship. In the article, Dr. Pande describes how the success of a startup is governed by a power law distribution, which is this idea that the most successful company in a given field will have the largest impact and outcome (e.g. an outcome could be quantified as a return on investment, or ROI, for example), while the rest will remain relatively unsuccessful and unknown. Given this, in the post, he argues that it is wise for academic founders to focus their time, energy, and effort on building a single, superlative company rather than spinning out many subpar companies.
Dr. Agarwala and the rest of the Bio Team at a16z highlight a founder’s adaptability and agility to flex into different roles as key traits they seek out.
“…someone with the really technical background and deep specialization who says, yeah, I am going to do this fundraising thing, I am going to learn how to pitch this concept and figure out what the big vision is here and engage a big group of investors on it…I am gonna be figure out how to hire people to work for me even though I haven’t done that before.”
In addition, Dr. Agarwala emphasized communication skills.
“Your ability to communicate your ideas clearly is so important not only in a fundraising context but then in the context of you going out and building your business right.”
DoorDash for healthcare delivery
“ I always use the example, if I can track exactly where my sandwiches are every step of the way from production to delivery…how can I not track that for aspects of my healthcare?”
Dr. Agarwala shared her thoughts on bringing a DoorDash-like infrastructure — transparency and visibility — into healthcare delivery. For example, she described how it is a truly transformative moment in the healthcare market right now, in which we are collecting more patient data outside of electronic health records (EHRs), via remote patient monitoring, at-home diagnostics, virtual care clinics, and so forth, allowing physicians to interact and serve patients on their own terms.
You can read more about other trends driving the future of biology, medicine, and healthcare in another a16z blog post, It’s Time to Heal.
Parting words on mentorship
Dr. Agarwala’s view on mentorship is simple:
“The biggest thing a mentor enables is for you to do…mentors who I have found it to be most instrumental in my own career [are those] who I find that I keep in touch with on our longitudinal basis because they continue to look out for those interests on [my] behalf over very long period of time.”
She went on to articulate that the best mentors are those that look at you not based on exactly what they have already done or accomplished but on what they think you could potentially do and what could be achievable.
Interested in investing, startups, or healthcare? Check out Spotlight on Women in Healthcare Ventures on Spotify and Anchor!
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Story written by Luiza Perez, Anna Kroner, Katie Donahey, and Ankeeta Shah.
