The Cost of Failure Has to Go to Zero (ft. Nish Khandwala)

**Ed Marx** (0:00)
If you were CEO, what would you do differently?

**Nish Khandwala** (0:03)
I would try to come up with some form of governance structure inside the hospital, where you can rapidly fail with your AI, quickly catch it and change it. It is pointless to have a five-year plan right now, or even a one-year plan in AI. You just have to be like, how can we be the most nimble and most agile?

**Ed Marx** (0:22)
That's one of the problems, is that they will have this structure that's worked for them 20 years ago, and they're trying to impose that same structure on modern software. You can't, it doesn't work like that.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:37)
Welcome to DGTL Voices, where health care and life science leaders explore the real work behind transformation. This podcast is about people, leadership and the conversations that move health care forward. Now your host, Ed Marx.

**Ed Marx** (0:53)
Welcome to another edition of DGTL Voices, and I'm proud to announce for the first time, we're actually doing visuals as well. So DGTL Voices is moving from a podcast only format to also posting on YouTube. Yeah, Nish, you're the first, and I didn't even tell you ahead of time. I hope you're cool with that.

**Nish Khandwala** (1:09)
Wow, that's amazing. Well, I'm glad I was prepared for it, I guess, somehow.

**Ed Marx** (1:16)
We're like number four. It depends on the day of the week, so it could be as low as number 10, but number four in the world.

**Nish Khandwala** (1:23)
Oh, wow.

**Ed Marx** (1:24)
Technology for podcasts. And so my kids who are legit social media influencers, I mean, that's how they make their living. They're always pushing me like, dad, you need to post this on YouTube as well, all of it.

**Nish Khandwala** (1:37)
Yeah, get it on Instagram wheels and then some TikTok as well, clips from it. Well, hopefully, I'll see a lot of that today. Let's see.

**Ed Marx** (1:44)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we are already on there, already on IG, on TikTok.
Yeah, but now we'll have more visuals than just audio. So I was really curious about your company and about what you do, and that's why we're connected. I know that you're doing some of this work, and that's how I know, over at my old stopping grounds at University Hospitals in Cleveland, Ohio, as well as Cleveland Clinic, which is literally across the street. So it's a lot of fun. But Nish, before we get there, what songs are on your playlist? What kind of music do you like to listen to?

**Nish Khandwala** (2:16)
Oh, I'm pretty standard stuff. Like right now, I've been putting Some Nights by Fun on repeat.
It's the song that I used to get pumped up about the day. But then the usual mix of John Mayer, Taylor Swift fan here as well, and some Bollywood music.

**Ed Marx** (2:36)
Yeah. Tell me your origin story. You mentioned Bollywood.

**Nish Khandwala** (2:40)
So I'm Indian. I was born in India, but actually did not grow up there. My family decided to move to the Middle East when I was six years old. So I don't remember a lot of my time in India, unfortunately. But my dad's a chemical engineer, so he moved us to Saudi Arabia, where the oil boom was happening when we moved there.
Not a lot to do in Saudi. I remember, we're also a nuclear family. It's just my parents and I, I don't have a sibling. I remember just coming back from school at one in the afternoon, and then having absolutely nothing to do at all. Spent eight years there, and then my parents realized that, oh, Nish is not a total idiot. And so they decided to take me to a place that had a few more opportunities, and we moved to Abu Dhabi near Dubai.
That's where they still live. And then I came to the US for my undergrad. I went to Stanford, did my undergrad and graduate studies there, and that's where I fell in love with the problem that then became Bunkerhill, our company.

**Ed Marx** (3:44)
Yeah, so tell me about your languages then. You speak Hindi first, but did you pick up Urdu or any?

**Nish Khandwala** (3:51)
Yeah, I actually did. So my mother tongue is Gujarati. It's a dialect or a language in the western part of India. I also know Hindi because when you're in India, you kind of learn that.
I picked up Arabic a little bit of it. I can write, but I can't understand it that well. And I gave up on trying to say Arabic because I couldn't just write the vocal chords the way I wanted them to. But I did learn Urdu for eight years. Beautiful language. The script is so beautiful. And then obviously English. So yeah, I think I have missed out on some of the major languages like Mandarin and then Spanish.