Building a Digitised All in One UK Homecare Tech Platform For the Elderly w/ Rajiv Tanna | Birdie

Rajiv Tanna: 0:00

The aging industry and how we look after our elderly in the UK is really broken. The number of people that can actually afford state-funded care is quite low. The experience of then finding that care, understanding what those needs are, coordinating between the GP, the district nurse, your agency, is very, very difficult, because my grandfather passed away about a year and a half before and so I'd be looking at the space just randomly that actually there was a gap for something that was, like you know, modern, cloud-based sort of deeply integrated, could really be an operating system for these care agencies and really easy to use. I think what's fascinating about where we are with with healthcare generally is that generative is transformational, particularly in healthcare, because everything is so textual and so the ability to really comprehend that and process that in a world where the number of doctors, the number of district nurses, is decreasing and our population, particularly our ageing population, is increasing is something we will have to invest in.

Amardeep Parmar: 0:53

Today's guest is Rajiv Tanna, co-founder of Birdie. They provide digital tools for care providers in the home. Birdie's got a really interesting journey that's not what you expect where he's worked in different industries, taken a career travelling break, worked in both corporate and start-up before doing his own thing. What's really great about this episode is he's really raw about the lessons he's learned and all the hard times too. Really hope you enjoy this episode. I'm Amar from the BAE HQ and this podcast is powered by HSBC Innovation Banking. So so great to have you on today and you've done so many different things in your career and Birdie's going incredibly well. But if you rewind back to the beginning, when you were growing up, what did you want to be? Did you have any idea?

Rajiv Tanna: 1:36

Well, look, first, it's really great to be here on the podcast and have this conversation and, you know, let people understand a little bit about my journey and how it can be helpful to them. Yeah, I mean, look, if I rewind to when I was a kid, there was, these like two tracks and I remember one. Weirdly, I wanted to be a jet fighter pilot, no idea why, and maybe I say that because there's a part of me that wants to like do adventurous things, and I've traveled around the world twice and I have an ambition to like live on a boat for years. So there's like this one part of me.

Rajiv Tanna: 2:00

But the other part, and I think I remember being at school where I think the, the head of the sixth form, said, like you know, go down the sort of merchant banking road, I think it was mentioned. So it's like this idea that you were like building businesses, um, spending time sort of investing in them, and so that's always been a passion of mine. Um, so even at 16, I think, I said to myself I'll go for a gap year when I'm 18, which I did, got a really uh prestigious internship for, like you know, pre-university, went through university and then said work in a you know, in a corporate job five years and then I'll leave, and I had that plan pretty clear.

Amardeep Parmar:

So you actually did that? 

Rajiv Tanna: 

So I did all of that I actually, it's really weird for me, but, like when I was 16, I did all those things.

Rajiv Tanna: 2:36

What I think I didn't realize is, once I got to the point of saying I want to do this thing, I hadn't really clarified what exactly it was, what type of business or what was this type of impact. So that's been the journey, I think, for the last. You know more like 15 years is like trying different businesses, trying different ideas, figuring out which one I can be most impactful. The other part of me is I'm just really geeky and techie. I was just thinking about the way here.  I'm like I used to play Redler. I used to, like you know, hack things together where I, like, pulled x boxes apart. So there's definitely been a part of me that just enjoys, you know, innovating or pushing the boundaries through technology.

Amardeep Parmar: 3:07

So the internship you did at 18, because obviously that's not a path many people pick right. Usually this path is go to university and then go on from there. What did you do in that year and why did you do that?

Rajiv Tanna: 3:18

Yeah, I I don't know why. I mean, first of all, I don't know why I did that, um, but I I was lucky enough to apply to Accenture and they had a Horizon scheme, and this was when I think you know, Accenture is still an incredible company, but it was right at that wave of sort of tech innovation sorry, tech outsourcing more than innovation and I applied to the scheme. There was five of us that got the offer to join, so five of us, luckily, in the whole of the UK, got to go to this thing and I worked in two different roles and then actually during uni, I actually got brought back by one of the partners to go and work, and this was all at the time that the NHS was outsourcing all of its tech, and so I was involved in some of those you know pieces of work at my age. So that was, it was fascinating.

Rajiv Tanna: 3:57

Then I went back to uni maths in maths and physics, and then I pivoted because so my dad's an accountant and he said, well, look, this is great, this tech consulting, but like, maybe you want to go down the accounting route, you know stability, etc. And I said, no, uh, but I'll go and do investment banking, and so you know, then joined UBS investment bank, was in very specifically picked their tech team because I wanted to stay close to tech. But it was this balance of like the finance side and the kind of the business side and then the technology innovation side that really appealed to me.

Amardeep Parmar:

Having that experience when you were 18, then going to university, did you feel like you were more mature for your age than, I guess, a lot of your peers, because you'd had that experience of working in that environment?

Rajiv Tanna: 4:35

I think I had a realization of what work was about at that point and maybe one example when I was in that 18 year period, I was working in a team and I was working with people who had gone through university five years earlier than me, but actually it all came down to the output and the quality of what you did. It really didn't matter to the managers where you came from, and so probably that's the biggest learning I got is that you have to constantly be learning, constantly be wanting to do the best job, and I know that's obviously, obviously as you get older you've got different responsibilities. That becomes harder, but I think that's one thing it instilled in me. Um, and yeah, I think university was it was, I enjoyed it because it was math and physics, and so I really got to do some, you know, really deeply kind of intellectual work, but actually I was very happy to get back into the workplace. 

Amardeep Parmar:

So at the end of the five years in corporate and investment banking, was it a case of you knew in your head?

Amardeep Parmar: 5:25

You said this plan from since you were 16. Okay, this five years is up, now, yeah, what do I do? Or were you already planning what you're going to do at a stage? When did you decide what then?

Rajiv Tanna: 5:34

Yeah, I mean I, I think, if I reflect, I'm not sure I did it the uh, I definitely jumped in the deep end and there's loads of learnings from that I probably, you know, looking back at myself, would have said why don't you do it another way? Um, so I actually went traveling. After that five years I got married and we said we're going to, go travel again. So it was really important to me that I got exposed to the broader world and again, one learning there was like we live in a very little bubble, particularly in London. When you go to other parts of the world, you just realize sort of what people really value and the cost of life is. So that was something that's sat within me. But I came back.

Rajiv Tanna: 6:07

I worked with an early stage founder at some, at one point. That didn't work out as a relationship. I then sort of had to go back to work. So I worked at you know world pay for a while, for a couple of years. Then I had my own idea and then that kind of didn't really work and I spent a good amount of money and, you know, learned a lot about what matters in a startup and then ultimately I joined Yieldify, which was, you know, a really good experience in terms of scaling.

Rajiv Tanna: 6:31

You know, I think it was pre-Series A at that point, post-series A getting really involved in like all the responsibility. I mean, my learning in all of that was that if I'd I knew I wanted to be in tech and this was right when there was some really exciting things happening sort of in, you know, startup scene, if I, if I could have consciously decided to like join one of those companies and be close like building um, that's something I would, I would replay, right? So, like banking was really in the Heyday when I when I started and I think it was the place to go. But now, knowing what I want to be, if I join an LHJ startup or something that was on the scale up journey, the amount of learning I would have had through that period would have been huge, whereas it's almost been like doing that learning myself much more.

Amardeep Parmar: 7:10

I think this is one of the things that you quite often where people have this idea that you've got to quit your job and start your own company straight away, which I don't think is true at all and like get to see that journey and I think it's still stressful, but it's less stressful than when it's your business  and that's such a good experience.

Amardeep Parmar: 7:27

But you had, obviously because you worked at other companies as well, but you mentioned that you try to start something yourself and you spent a lot of money on that which didn't work out. Can we go into that a bit more, because I think that's something often people just miss out is that bit where it's not always the first idea you have that works out, and sometimes you do make mistakes, lose money and then later on you can still be successful. 

Rajiv Tanna: 7:48

Yeah, I mean, it's a really interesting period. So I, I was at world pay and I thought, okay, um, we're in this period where everything was happening through, so world pay, for everyone's benefit, is the people that basically process the payments. Um, whenever you go pay in tesco but this was the point where we were pre apple pay, we were still using cards and we were tapping and contactless rates were just about increasing to a point where we, you know about, there was still like 20, 30%, I think from memory. And so I thought, okay, well, look, this whole experience of going into a restaurant and splitting the bill and paying is annoying. Point of sale terminals are awful when you look at them, and so my idea at that point was like, how do I connect all these things? And you, you know, there was the sort of bluetooth beacons at the point, so it's like we can make this an incredible experience of you know, you come in the restaurant and it all connects and you know what your bill is and off you go. And I thought that was a great idea. Um, and I think, and so I went okay, great idea, I'm gonna do it. I'm, you know, I'm smart, I'm a banker. I've done this like I go.

Rajiv Tanna: 8:39

And then the reality came, which is like I had I really two things I hadn't really asked myself like do I really care about this problem personally, and is this a problem that's really that important right now and something that someone's going to actually pay for? Um, and, by the way, at this point I was working out of m,y my ex boss's office and the delivery team had been like literally in the office a little while before and I spent some of the restaurants. So it was. It was humbling to realize. Number one I didn't. It wasn't something I really cared about that much. Number two it wasn't really a big pain, it only really became a pain of a pandemic.

Rajiv Tanna: 9:13

And then actually we look now you know there's a lot of opportunity for sort of embedded payments in point of sale, but that's taken a 10-year journey. And number three, I think I wasn't listening enough to what the market or the customer needs, and that's just like very humbling, because you, you think it's the idea and you're just gonna, you know that's it, you're done. Actually, it's a much more kind of being open and listening and iterating and being agile as you go through this journey. I guess maybe that's the reflection on my path. It's been that you know meandering through, and that's been that you know meandering through, and even today I would say that you know Birdie has achieved a lot, but there's still a lot of meandering to do to figure out where we're going to go next and how we're going to. You know, continue to achieve the success we have.

Amardeep Parmar: 9:51

I think that's something which a lot of first-time founders always go through is the idea that they think is their idea but it's not really the idea. Like I said, it's the problem. Do you care enough to keep trying different things to solve this problem, or is that going to frustrate you? And it's hard for people to make that realization because you think it's about your idea when it's just it's not really that about your idea it's about the problem?

Amardeep Parmar: 10:15

Do you care enough about that problem? And once you had that experience, obviously it didn't put you off going to start a company later on down the line, but after Yieldify. So you had this experience at a company which is growing and it's obviously done pretty well afterwards as well. What then made you decide to take the next step or go, going from there?

Rajiv Tanna: 10:33

Yeah, I think I think the one of the experiences of Yieldify was that, um, I I joined as, like head of product and you know it was driving the company on the product side, and I think I use it as a really useful experience to learn how to build product and technology. So one of the things that was important to me in my career was, like entrepreneurship is hard and there's, you know, there's very high chances it may not be successful, right? So that's the first thing people need to admit, because it's really easy to say look at these amazing people that done it. And so I also wanted to have like a strong sort of skill set and I think for me, pivoting from banking um, yes, you could go down the CFO path I wanted to get close to the customer, solving the problem. So product engineering is really important. So that was, that was the first step. I think at the, the back end of Yieldify, one learning for me was that I wanted to own my own thing and drive my own thing, and so there wasn't, you know, I think the business had got to a point where it wasn't that the right place for me to be there anymore. Um, again, I had young kids at the time. I have all the kind of responsibilities so, you know, pivoted to then working Asos for a couple of years just to get some experience.

Rajiv Tanna: 11:34

And then, in reality, what was happening in the background is I was constantly talking to founders and exploring and looking for people to meet and work with, because my skill set is, like, I would say, bridging that kind of the person who loves the problem with how do we solve the problem through the product technology. And I see this a lot like a lot of people have this idea, but there's quite a lot between the idea and actually getting it, you know, tested, validated, through to market. And so you know that led to Birdie right and Birdie eventually was this opportunity where I met Max, my co-founder, and Abeed, also my co-founder, and they had this broad idea of, like the aging industry and how we look after our elderly. In the UK  is really broken and you can look at all the stats around that um, how do we solve for that problem? And I was lucky enough to join them at a point where you know they had got some early funding.

Rajiv Tanna: 12:21

They had this idea, they'd it, but they needed someone to like figure out how to make this a business and pivot it, and so that was, you know, perfect what I was looking for. And then, on top of that, my parents have a care home, my broader family have care home, and inside me there's always been this desire to do something that has social impact and not just a commercial benefit to me. And so, you know, it's very rare that you find a business that can do high growth, really interesting problems based like from a technical product perspective, but also, thirdly, like genuinely is going to be impacting, you know, hundreds and thousands of people's lives, and that's, I think, what I find unique about what we've built so far.

Amardeep Parmar: 13:01

We hope you're enjoying the episode so far. We just want to give a quick shout out to our headline partners, HSBC Innovation Banking. One of the biggest challenges for so many startups is finding the right bank to support them, because you might start off and try to use a traditional bank, but they don't understand what you're doing. You're just talking to an AI assistant or you're talking to somebody who doesn't really understand what it is you've been trying to do. HSBC have got the team they've built out over years to make sure they understand what you're doing. They've got the deep sector expertise and they can help connect you with the right people to make your dreams come true.

Amardeep Parmar: 13:32

So if you want to learn more, check out hsbcinnovationbanking.com. What's interesting as well because you mentioned about your young kids and taking that option, which is a bit more safe in terms of making sure they're all secure there, and then going into another startup where you said there's risk involved. What was that trigger? That said, okay, you said the different things are what aligned, but I guess it's quite hard for many people listening sometimes where they've got kids, they've got responsibilities yeah so then, choose to take their leap.

Amardeep Parmar: 13:59

What reassured you about Birdie and the team to decide, okay, this is something worth me taking this risk? 

Rajiv Tanna: 14:06

That's a really good question. I think I was reassured by the team because they were they're super smart, they're super capable, really driven. I also thought I could fit with them in terms of skill sets that I was bringing and I think that's really important. I think people can found individually, but I think that requires an enormous sacrifice and enormous, enormous capability. And it's relatively rare from what I've seen so you, relatively rare from what I've seen, so you know, having a team of originally four of us. Someone on the technical side, someone who was like the visionary entrepreneur and could really compel the market where you know it's healthcare. You need to have a, you need to be able to deal with a lot of people outside of just your day-to-day business, and then someone who's commercial was a really cool fit and so I feel like I could, you know, slot in there add value. There was a click in terms of how we operated and worked um on the on the other side.

Rajiv Tanna: 14:53

I, I can't, I can't say that sometimes, when I look back, I haven't just taken crazy risks that I'm not sure many other people would um like. You know that they're not the most sensible all the time and, um in, in retrospect, I'm sure if I take other paths might have in life it would be different. But I think, when I think about it more like there's just a part of me that enjoys that. And I back to my early days, like you know, building businesses being part of who I am. And so the real question for me is like, how do you balance that with your other aspirations and wants, whether that's, you know, family, etc.

Rajiv Tanna: 15:28

Now, those balances are different for different people, but for me, like you know,, it didn't seem that difficult a risk to take and, to be honest, I'd also managed my life in a way where I could afford to take those risks and not have any real impact on my day-to-day life. I mean, we're very privileged here. So the risk is, on your personal side, it's not that high. The question is do you have the willingness to, like, commit to the effort, the energy, the resilience that you're going to have to have? Big as any business is hard, right, and so that's kind of the way I think about it.

Amardeep Parmar: 16:01

And you mentioned how you're still meandering in some aspects but, obviously you've done quite a lot of meandering so far. Can you talk about that journey as well? So obviously, once you joined, you're now trying to work out, okay, what's the best way to solve this problem we're trying to deal with. What are some of the things you tried and how has that pivoted over time?

Rajiv Tanna: 16:17

You mean for Birdie specifically. So I think at the beginning, Birdie was actually a b2c product. So the idea was that if you are, you know, the loved one of someone who is receiving care at home or needs care at home, how do we support you to monitor your loved one better and feel comfort that they're being looked after? And that was all about sensors and connectivity, and so that was like before I joined. I guess my realization was we're a bunch of founders that don't know about social care and healthcare. We're very early, we haven't got any traction, we are burning some money here. So I suggested we pivot to being a SaaS business and looking at the market. And I'd done, actually weirdly, some research the year before because my grandfather passed away about a year and a half before and so I'd be looking at the space just randomly that actually there was a gap for something that was, like you know, very modern, cloud-based, sort of deeply integrated could really be an operating system for these care agencies and really easy to use. So, um, deeply integrated could really be an operating system for these care agencies and really easy to use. So you know, suggested we pivot there um become assessments.

Rajiv Tanna: 17:18

I think from that point onwards, it's been relatively good for quite a while. We executed really effectively for like three or four years and I think we just got lots of traction. Our growth like really grew and it was because there was such a need in the market for this problem. So you know, for that first product we had massive pmf.

Rajiv Tanna: 17:29

I think where the the journey is more interesting now is building your first product and launching that really successfully is very different to both, you know, building your second or third products and in our case, like, it's all about how these products compound on each other. But also it's a totally different experience building a team versus building you know the first product, and so that has been more where the meandering and the life journeys come. And I think when you look at people who have been more in the kind of grown in a company, a large company, those skills that they've absorbed by managing more people, managing the projects, are very different than the skills that you typically have when you are a founder building something, you know, with a team of three or four. So it's more that meandering of like how do you, how do you evolve yourself for this next phase of the business, rather than the business itself. 

Amardeep Parmar: 18:20

You mentioned that how you execute the first product really well. What are some of the things that Birdie did that meant that you really captured the market really quickly?

Rajiv Tanna: 18:25

If I look at the business, there was a few things.So one was, um, speed of execution on the product. Like you know, I just think if you have a really aligned you know product engineering team, that can go fast. There's nothing beyond that and that's quite hard to do in my experience. I think it's possible but it's quite hard to do. Second is, you know, we were obsessed with, like sort of the bar of quality, the brand, and so, yes, Birdie has a, an element which is the product, but we also talk about the partnership, we talk about the support we give, we over invest in that, and all of that fits under this brand which says that we're not here to just sell you software. We're here to partner with you to evolve the way that care is living in the community, so that we can, yes, make you more efficient, but we can make the quality of care much better for the people that are receiving care, because that's what our mission is, not to sell you software, so that really works.

Rajiv Tanna: 19:10

I think, in terms of actually how you do that, as someone who is not an engineer and has no idea about healthcare, if I look back at it, I tried really hard to get an extremely good you know engineering leader around me I tried to get I wanted to make sure that we had someone who was a GP or had a healthcare background and also some from the care sector and actually and then a really good designer, because I have a lot of belief that design thinking can solve these problems or at least iterate quickly on solving these problems and learn quite quickly. All of the magic was putting those people together and setting up the right you know vision, processes, inspiration, like just being an enthusiastic sort of founder and saying this is what we can achieve, let's go. That was a lot of it. I take very little credit for what we did. If I'm being honest, I think it was more pulling people together and driving them.

Amardeep Parmar: 20:03

You mentioned that about the partnerships with the providers as well. So care homes are obviously quite a traditional industry. There could be. I'm just assuming here that there'll be some pushback in terms of people want to keep things the way they are if it's not broken, don't fix it or they're almost intimidated by the software and like how is this going to actually benefit us? Is this the right choice or not? How do you overcome some of those hurdles of getting people to trust Birdie, especially in the early days, to become those initial customers and come on board and trust that you had their back?

Rajiv Tanna: 20:32

Yeah, I mean, I think you're absolutely right and, by the way, like that's sort of the, the challenge of our business, right, it's like it will take time for this to happen. Um, it's not like one of those things where there's, you know, hundreds of thousand customers out there and you can just sell to someone out there, like it's. It's a relatively constrained sort of market, so it will take time. But in the early days, the um, I think there was such pain with the way things were being done and the alternative softwares that had been created historically. Um so on. The pain.

Rajiv Tanna: 21:01

If you think about someone going into, um a home to deliver care and if that's all done on paper, number one, you have to figure out how they get there. Then they have to go into the home, uh, with all the right keys, then they have to do all the work that's there, including medication delivery, which is something that's, you know, something that UK industry does, and then also log all the notes. Now, that's great. This is like remote, like sort of remote employees before we even had the pandemic. They then go around and do loads of those shifts and you, as someone who employs all these people, are sitting in an office with zero visibility of what's happened in that location, have no idea if the meds have been missed, et cetera. You just have to go on faith, right, and at this point, by the way, most people were just dialing in saying I'm there and that was it. So when you come along and say, look, we’re going to give you a safe platform that’s going to let you monitor the meds being given. Understand what you know, information is coming back from that home, what tasks are delivered and you can get real-time visibility on that and you can feel much more confident that the carer is of the quality you want and you can be responsive to what's happening, that's meaningful, right?

Rajiv Tanna: 22:01

The flip side was at that point the software providers had, especially on this, what we call point of care side had not really delivered. I think they used to go down a lot. They were unreliable, they were clunky, not, you know, not easy to use particular carer. So I would say it was that like that real pain point, having something that was genuinely really easy to use but also investing the time to really think about it from a data privacy and clinical safety perspective to make it very safe and reliable to use.

Rajiv Tanna: 22:32

There's partners of ours that for like five years prior, with another software vendor, had not decided to move their medications digital because they were just too worried about the risk. Only when they came to Birdie because of the way we'd really deeply thought about the design of the product. They were like no, this makes sense, we feel safe with this, we're going to go live with it and, by the way, that's also one of the most interesting things about Birdie is like we cannot afford to ever go down, because you're talking about like someone's mum or dad at home with potentially a medication that could be life critical, and so it's that level of you know seriousness with which we have to take our product development.

Amardeep Parmar:

You mentioned as well, quite humbly, that it's all about the team you built as well, and the team who are doing their jobs really well.

Amardeep Parmar: 23:13

How did you pick those people? How did you, I think this is one of the hardest things for all founders to try and pick those people to be able to trust these, really important jobs? How were you able to find the right people?

Rajiv Tanna: 23:23

I mean, I mean maybe the the way to think about it is that, like over my whole career, because I've had this aspiration of, like you know, wanting to build something, I would always like remember people that I thought stood out in their role, or just their work, I think, or their capability, and people that I thought, okay, if I could get them on board to something I'm doing, that would be amazing. And so that was, like, I think, one way of knowing that bar and and you meet a lot of people as you go through your journey, especially if you're in like high growth startups and you'll you'll meet people in the through networking. So that was one way and there's definitely a hand, like a number of people who've come to Birdie, who I've worked with before, who you know eventually, even after years, I've been sort of trying to get them in. I think that then helps you get a bar, for you know other people, um, that you're looking to bring on board and you can tell I think you can tell quite quickly an interview process if about definitely someone's competence, you can definitely probe questions and, like you know, are they able to do the job you're asking them to do.

Rajiv Tanna: 24:18

But secondly, and I think, most importantly for Birdies like, can you get a really good sense of their passion to solve this problem? Because in those early days it's as much about your like growth mindset and your resilience as it is like you know your actual ability to do this specific job because you're being so many different things, and so it is that kind of founder mindset or like founding team mindset that you're looking for. Those are the bits that I looked for, how I found them and you know how they found us. In some cases, I think it is just a bit of you know luck, right place, perseverance. You know loads of interviews. I think I've done thousands of interviews by this point. Yeah that's how you do it.

Amardeep Parmar: 24:58

So after this interview, we're doing our final round of interviews for our first full-time employee.

Rajiv Tanna: 25:02

Okay.

Amardeep Parmar: 25:02

So interview? We're doing our final round of interviews for our first full-time employee. Okay, so I'm going to pick up any tips from you after this as well. Have you have, do you? Have any favorite questions you'd like to ask people?

Rajiv Tanna: 25:07

Um, the one, the one that I always like to like come back to, is like questions that go to their inner purpose and who they are. So things like you know, where do you want to be in five years? Like you know what really, what really motivates you, you know, who's on the product side of what's inspiring on the product, like anything that kind of gets a bit under the skin and is not like the obvious you know, response. Now, that was in the early days, I would say. Now, depending on the role, we're much more precise on the kinds of questions we ask.

Rajiv Tanna: 25:35

I think, I think the other thing is that there is a gut feel that you get and I think you know sometimes we're a bit too overly processed. It's good to have that and have the frameworks and do they take these, but you can sort of get a gut feel and if I look back at that early team, there was just a chemistry that was there and maybe that's the other way to think about it is it's not just the individual, but it's how does that individual fit into the overall team? Like, because your job is to construct the team. I don't think, think I'm not sure how many people pay attention to that versus okay, that's a really good person, but like, will that person really fit into my team to you know, make this an incredible high performing unit?

Amardeep Parmar: 26:11

And I think we had the same thing where some of the people who applied for the job, you could see the way their character traits were where, in a way, it wasn't covering the gaps that we had, and that's one of the things we're looking at as well.

Amardeep Parmar: 26:22

It's not necessarily just about who's on this standalone who's the best, but it's also, if they're good at something, could really have the skills in, then it's not necessarily best to hire that person. You want somebody's covering the bits that we're not good at and it's really good at those things. And I think sometimes it's hard because you almost have an affinity towards people who are like you, by having somebody like yourself means that they don't do the bits that you're not good at.

Rajiv Tanna: 26:44

Yeah, it's exactly that. And it's like back to that point, like what's the shape of this person? And even in a role, in the same role, like by title, in different companies or different stages of company, the shape of the person will be different, right? So like back to my point, my job as a, you know, chief product officer is very different when it was a team of, you know, five of five of us versus a team of 110. So, like, that shape needs to change and evolve and I think a lot of people can learn to evolve that shape.

Rajiv Tanna: 27:09

But often there are some, you know, some places where they're going to be stronger than you know, than others. And so, yeah, back to your point, like how do you figure out what that shape needs to look like and then put people in the right places? So the analogy is, like you know, a football team analogy or any team analogy. Like your job as a manager is to figure out how do you make the most performant team by putting people in the right place. And I think back to my point around the early days, it was like knowing that you need someone who has context of industry, knowing someone who's an incredible engineer, knowing someone who can really think about solving problems with design perspective, you can get those people in a room that's incredibly powerful and then then genuinely, the magic is, you know, happening together.

Amardeep Parmar: 27:47

So you mentioned that your job changed significantly over the last few years as well. Which areas do you think you've had to grow in personally quite a lot in order to achieve or to be effective in your new role as a much larger organization?

Rajiv Tanna: 27:52

I think in the early days, like it's all about sort of getting into the details and, um, you know, I know there's a lot being talked about with founder mode right now. So you know, I view on that. But you know, getting in the details, being with the team, encouraging them, like servant leadership, et cetera, that's a big part of it. As the team scales, when you've got, you know, four or five teams, they're all running independently. There is much more around, you know comms, strategy, clarity, and I think that becomes much more important because actually your job is to provide that direction and clarity and, yes, I think, still get involved in the details where necessary and really support people and I'll never lose that from who I am but also at the right point, like scale the systems and the team, rather than, you know, thinking about the product day in and day out. So that's, that's been an interesting change.

Rajiv Tanna: 28:48

I think the other thing which is a learning and you know I'm still very much on the journey of, you know, post series B now is that as a founder, there is sort of like you have to be even more precise with what you're saying and the intention behind what you're saying, because it can quickly, you know, be misunderstood, and not because you said something wrong or it was misunderstood by the person immediately, but it kind of sets off a team in a certain direction. So just being very intentional, and again, those are skills I don't think you naturally have if you're a early stage founder. So you have to grow this quite a lot.

Amardeep Parmar: 29:23

So you said you had some thoughts on founder there, so you've teed me up in a question there, what's your thoughts there?

Rajiv Tanna: 29:29

I think there's a balance to have, but I think there is, there is. There is an opportunity for people to get much more involved as founders, in the detail, I think, from a couple aspects. So one is you often know the kind of, you have an intrinsic understanding of the problem space and the solution because you've been spending like five or six years on it, and so you can imagine when someone new comes along and it is a professional like it takes a while for them to ramp up. That, that's one element. I think there's a second element of like maintaining the sort of pace of innovation and excitement and sort of what can we do next with the technologies that are coming? And then the third thing which I think is somewhat you know, um, we don't talk about, but like there's all these systems. You put in place OKRs, KPIs, etc. And you think you can manage the OKRs and KPIs and you should, you should have those things.

Rajiv Tanna: 30:11

But there's also, I think, just like a ruthless focus on execution, prioritization and like checking in the status updates and in our case, for example, I think we've moved back to more like weekly check-ins with the teams or, you know, weekly demos of where the product's going, and I've always believed that that high, like high feedback loop and like cadence in the way that the teams work leads to more output over time. Right, you just learn quicker, and so that's one area of fandom mode that I'm, I'm probably leaning into more. Um, you know, there's different versions of this, I think so it's just what works for you.

Amardeep Parmar: 30:47

So obviously, as you said, Birdie's been around for several years now, been growing significantly, had your Series B. What are the biggest wins you've had so far and what are you most proud of?

Rajiv Tanna: 30:58

Yeah, I mean the biggest wins are really just helping more and more, you know, care assignments, having partners um continuing to grow. We're very, very lucky to have some of the most prestigious sort of home care brands in the country. Um, you know, working with us, I think now starting to, in addition, use the data we're collecting to drive more and more policy. It takes a long time, but I think you know the the UK particularly. Obviously, the healthcare system is really struggling. Social care is um hugely sort of underrepresented and so um just being very close to those industry leaders, leaders and supporting them people who've been in this industry for 30 years with you know the technology, the data we have is like very rewarding. Uh, sometimes I don't reflect on it enough, but that's, that's an amazing part of what we get to do.

Amardeep Parmar: 31:45

Have you got any idea of how many patients or how many carers you've helped?

Rajiv Tanna: 31:50

Yeah, I mean, look on on a on a weekly, on a monthly basis, we do about five million visits and we have about 70 000 uh patients on the platform and about 40, 50 000 carers. So in terms of volume, it's really really, you know, grown substantially um over the last. So in terms of volume, it's really really grown substantially over the last five years and in a very, very short time period. 

Amardeep Parmar: 32:11

And then looking to the future, obviously Birdie's done so much good already.

What do you hope Birdie will be able to achieve in the next few years?

Rajiv Tanna: 32:14

Yeah. So I think for the consumer themselves or someone who's a patient, or their loved one, it is really about giving them a much better experience of the whole aging journey, right the early days of you know, services, content that can help them understand what's happening and get that support, uh, in a more frictionless way and then, over time, obviously making it easier for them to find the care they need um be assured that the care is of the right quality, etc. So you know, we I think what's fascinating about where we are with with healthcare generally is that generative is transformational, particularly in healthcare, because everything is so textual, and so the ability to really comprehend that and process that in a world where the number of doctors, the number of district nurses, is decreasing and our population, particularly our aging population, is increasing, is something we will have to invest in. So that's the bit that excites me most in terms of the opportunity we have, opportunity we have in the sector. 

Amardeep Parmar: 33:08

So time to move to five questions now. Thanks, so much coming on. First question is if people want to find out more about you and more about Birdie, where should they go to?

Rajiv Tanna: 33:13

Yeah, so personally I'm on linkedin. That's the place I um, you know, do a little bit of posting um Birdie. Just check out our website um Birdie.care. There's loads of information there. Um, if you're interested in, you know, joining us, you can, can have a look or supporting us anyway.

Amardeep Parmar: 

And is there anything that you need help right now or that the audience could help you with?

Rajiv Tanna: 33:29

Definitely from an audience perspective, people that may have been through this next journey um, you know how to navigate that, how to balance the investments and sort of scaling your business, continuous innovation. That would be a massive area, I think. Also, just connecting with founders who are further down, you know, through the journey is always incredibly valuable.

Amardeep Parmar: 33:46

So again, thanks so much for coming on, and you can see my voice is going to give away a few times in the last few minutes, but have you got any final words?

Rajiv Tanna: 33:52

No, I don't actually. I think it's been really great to be here and thanks for, you know, inviting me on to have a conversation about what we're doing at Birdie and the journey that I've been on.

Amardeep Parmar:

Thank you for watching. Don’t forget to subscribe. See you next time.

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