Lucro, which is backed by Martin Ventures, announced today the launch of a new marketplace set for 2016. It’s designed to accelerate decision making for healthcare leaders, allowing them to discover, compare and collaborate with peers around solutions based on a comprehensive lists of data along with reviews. Think of it almost as a TripAdvisor, Yelp and LinkedIn combined for organizations and those innovating within health IT, digital health and medical devices, both new companies and already developed – but not for public use in the same way.
As Lucro CEO and respected Seinfeld/healthcare analogy enthusiast Bruce Brandes emphasized in an interview, technology has advanced greatly for consumers in order to gather data and find what they are looking for and to benefit from input thanks to reviews in many industries. Thus far, that hasn’t been the case within the mission to fund fruitful healthcare startups . Consolidating that information would be extremely useful. So that’s what they’ve done.
The goal is essentially to dodge the “over-sold and under-delivered” aspect that the healthcare space has sometimes seen in the past, according to Brandes.
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Here’s some of what Brandes had to say about the advancement with Lucro’s Marketplace:
Where does Lucro’s Marketplace fit in the industry considering current unmet needs?
“It became clear [to us] that there was an unmet need on both sides in the industry, and fundamentally it comes down to if we believe that healthcare needs to execute on innovation faster, with greater clarity, lower risk and the way in which we do that today has tremendous opportunity to disrupt and reinvent to the benefit for both buyers and sellers.”
What has the market looked like for entrepreneurs and how do you plan to disrupt that?
“All of the entrepreneurs that were coming to us [Martin Ventures] looking for capital weren’t so much looking for capital as they were looking for customers. They were looking for the executive representative with the big Rolodex. I think we know now that that model doesn’t really working anymore. We found that CEOs were saying that they were looking to filter the ‘universe of the shiny things’ because there are so many companies out there pitching and they all sound the same, so frankly we either waste time in meetings that two minutes in, we know we shouldn’t be here, or we put up a wall to keep them all out. The CEOs worry about what innovations we are missing out on that we should really know about.
If you think about how you buy a car today, plan a vacation or choose a restaurant, it’s amazing how rapidly these tools have made our lives easier. But if you look at how buyers and sellers in healthcare connect, it really hasn’t fundamentally changed that much. There are so many innovations in healthcare that could be transformative, but the people who need to know about them don’t get to understand what startups are doing along with credibility and through people they trust.”
How is this marketplace compiled in a way that you’re sure it’s credible?
“We aim to be the independent broker of what’s out there. Everyone else who’s approached something like this has been encumbered by some legacy interest that made it difficult to disrupt. We took a fresh look at it and said, ‘How should it be?’ Because of our network we had enough relationships with CEOs or senior executives in healthcare organizations to understand what they were really looking for. They first and foremost knew what they were looking for privately and could help us to understand how that would translate.
We are not aspiring to have a Lucro point of view about a product or solution. We want to create a vehicle for people who have experience to be able to report the facts and then privately share comments, ratings and reviews.”
For the Lucros Marketplace, companies have “Solution Cards” that essentially spell out the facts about what the company does, plain and simple – no pitch, no marketing. So over time, the database will build with the incentive from these startups providing information to provide a robust collection, which is being monitored in order to exclude any illegitimate candidate for investors.
It should be additionally noted, the community is contributing input and reviews is by invitation only. In addition, Brandes mentioned Lucro’s diverse and professionally credible advisory board that has been put in place to monitor and insure that this distribution of information is not biased, either on the part of Lucro or by those who contribute information to the marketplace.
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Because Bruce and I have a history of sharing Seinfeld banter that relates to healthcare (yes it’s there), and a generally acute recollection of practically every episode, I had to ask:
Is Lucro’s Marketplace essentially designed to rule out the Vandelay Industries‘ from distracting investors?
“That is one of our goals – to make sure that Vandelay Industries gets exposed very quickly, fails fast and gets out of the way.”
