The Process: The Mindset of an Entrepreneur (Ep.3)

Dr. Michael Gervais (0:20)

All right, welcome to The Process. Alex, how are you doing?

Alex Fiance (0:24)

Good, Mike, what's going on?

Dr. Michael Gervais (0:25)

Yeah, you know, this feels like a little treat for me to be able to have these conversations with you and to have them frequently. And we get to have these little nuggets, little gems of what you're doing, what you're up to. And I'm super excited about this conversation because we're gonna introduce one of the companies that you've invested in. And so before we get started there, just give me an update about what's been going on, what are you trying to sort out, what's actually happening in your business.

And I'd love to hear what's going on.

Alex Fiance (0:52)

Yeah, look, day to day we're always looking at new companies to work with, to back. But we're also obviously supporting the companies that we've already backed. So we just did the public launch of the eldercare business that we've been working with, along with the company iBeat that I actually mentioned we invested in on the last episode.

Dr. Michael Gervais (1:13)

So we- What was the name of the first one? Sorry, what was the name of the first one?

Alex Fiance (1:16)

CERA, C-E-R-A, so they focus on home care for the aging population in the UK. And they're pretty far along. They've already done 200,000 hours of care. They're the UK's highest rated care agency. And they announced this amazing innovation where currently to have someone come to your home as a care worker, you're kind of, let's say, renting them for the whole day.

They just released a kind of first of its kind innovation where if there are, let's say, multiple patients with similar needs in an area, the care worker can rotate between households every few hours. So you can cut the cost by as much as 75% and only pay for what you need, which is a massive breakthrough in terms of making this type of care accessible for everybody. Because currently you're paying as much as $1,500 a week for home care in the UK. So this is obviously a new model.

And if it goes well, it's something that we can scale all over the world. So we're really excited about it. That was the big announcement we made. And as part of that, if someone's not gonna have care 24-7, we also need to make sure that if there's an emergency that they can be taken care of. So that's part of why we invested in iBeat, which is that smart watch that is almost like a home security system for your heart that will alert the EMTs if there's heart failure.

And I think those two complement each other very well. And CERA also announced that you could have a care worker in your home if there's an emergency within 30 minutes.

Dr. Michael Gervais (2:55)

Cool. Okay, so as you're rolling-

Alex Fiance (2:58)

All these things tie together, is what I'm saying.

Dr. Michael Gervais (3:00)

Yeah, okay, so as you're rolling these out, is that how you think about rolling things out? Like having the companies snap together or creating a synergistic rising tide? Or is that just unique in what's happening right now for you?

Alex Fiance (3:14)

Yeah, I think that's the way we want to enter a market, right? We focus on how do we solve this problem or this consumer pain point more so than we say, how do we find a great company to invest in or how do we launch this one company? So we wanted to enter the market and make a big splash around the problem itself, that it's next to impossible for people to currently afford the best care and that it's a major problem with the growing aging population. So I think it makes a much bigger splash to show, hey, there are multiple new solutions that we're helping bring to market and they complement each other. One of the things that's on our mind, and we could probably dive into it a little bit after we chat with Tim, the entrepreneur, is we're just seeing a very, very high volume of companies. Especially now that we've publicly talked about the problems we're trying to solve, we're getting a lot more inbound.

It's a little bit overwhelming, to be honest. So what that's forced on us is that we need to make decisions much, much, much faster. So we can talk about this a little bit after you talk to Tim, because I think for the audience, just as context, we're inviting on one of the more impressive young entrepreneurs I've ever met in my life. Tim is someone who I hope one day we'll go into politics because our world needs more leaders like him. But he's just an exceptional entrepreneur who has no limiting beliefs around what you can or can't do when you're young.