The following interview is a conversation we had with Dipanwita Das, CEO of Sorcero, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Over $20 Million Raised to Power Medical Affairs Teams of the Future
Dipanwita Das
Hey, thank you, Brett. I’m excited to be here.
Brett
No problem. So were just joking there in the pre interview, but I’m unable to say your name properly, so we’re going to let you go ahead and say your actual first name here so I don’t insult you right off the bat.
Dipanwita Das
So I’ve been talking to my mom extensively about why she put a silent w in my name, but it is pronounced Depanita, and I do genuinely go by D. So, Brett, that’s great.
Brett
All right, perfect. Well, to kick things off, can we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Dipanwita Das
Sure. So my background is at the intersection of public health and data. I spent a number of years building digital scientific platforms for legislations around diseases that come out of tobacco use and out of obesity. And what’s really interesting about digital scientific platforms is that’s exactly what our customers in medical affairs do every day. But they do it in support of accelerating the adoption of their products, aka new drugs and breakthrough treatments that they might be bringing to market. As I was doing that work, I became very well acquainted with this trio of challenges that are assaulting life sciences, and it’s really making it harder for patients to access breakthrough treatments as they come to market. First, of course, data is everywhere. There’s a lot of it. It’s also spread out and really hard to handle. The data unification challenge is extremely real.
Dipanwita Das
I think. Number two, the other thing I discovered is that were building the same thing over and over again. With every new campaign, with every new group were supporting, with every new disease were working on, we’d start everything again and build again, which means that there wasn’t a software driven workflow that is inherently scalable and inherently allows us to work at pace with the data that is being generated and the data that we needed to work with. I’m a big fan of new tech, but I’m really a fan of new tech when it can be used fairly quickly to solve business problems. And I think in 2018, when I started Sourcero, transfer, learning models really changed everything for us and what we do. And that’s sort of where Sourcero came to be.
Dipanwita Das
And my background in public health, in technology, and in really measuring human productivity came together.
Brett
A few quick questions that we like to ask. And the goal here is really just to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder. First one is what CEO and Founder do you admire the most, and what do you admire about them?
Dipanwita Das
That’s a great question. One of the people I’m a bit of fan of is Frank Slutman, who’s the CEO of Snoke. I really like his focus and his drive and making sure that everything is measurable when you read his book, amp it up. One of the things that really echoed with me, and by the way, I did make my entire team read the book as well, was keeping the pressure on changing frequently, but doing everything in a very intentional manner. We talk a lot about move fast, break things in strata world, but at the end of the day, the success of an experiment is very much dependent on the quality of its design and the intentionality behind it. And that combination of a high pressure, high drive, move fast environment with very finely tuned experimentation and iteration, that one’s a slam dunk.
Dipanwita Das
And of course, his record speaks for itself.
Brett
Yeah, absolutely. What I love most about that book, or I found just fascinating, is it’s written by an operator. It’s someone who’s actively managing this big, massive company. And I feel like that’s not very common. Typically, you read these books and they’re retired ceos or management consultants, but this guy is very much in the thick of it and executing on this big vision and writing books somehow on the side as he’s doing all that I find fascinating.
Dipanwita Das
I think he mentions in his book that part of the reason he wrote is because he couldn’t and did not have the time to one one advise a lot of people, founders and ceos, I’m sure, who are asking him for advice. But you are absolutely right. Learning from an operator is a real honor and a very different experience.
Brett
Yeah, absolutely. And to dig a bit deeper then into books, and we always like to talk about books, but we’ll get away from business books here. So there’s an author named Ron and Holliday. Who calls them quickbooks. So a quickbook is a book that rocks you to your core and really influences just how do you personally think about life and approach life? Do any quickbooks like that come to mind for you?
Dipanwita Das
Yes. Unfortunately, it’s not one. It’s probably several. But since we’re not doing this on video, I think you saw the glimpse of my library behind me. Books have been and continue to be a big driving force in my life. And the category I think I’m most fond of is science fiction and fantasy fiction. There are three books I read right about the time I turned ten that not only rocked my world then, but continue to hugely influence me. One, of course, is the Lord of the Rings and the entirety of the series. But there are two trains that I really picked up from there. One is, how do you handle power, really great power, even if you are, quote unquote, on the right side. Number two is, of course, nature and climate, and the importance of retaining that balance with the environment around you.
Dipanwita Das
The second book is the Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy. I think the piece across all of it really stuck with me is the importance of asking the right question. So much of what we do at Sorcero today is around turning data into information, but that’s as much dependent on asking the right question as it is having all of that information available. And the third was catch 22. And I’ll leave that maybe for another time. But of course, the absurdity of war through some of the most elegant satire ever written.
Brett
I’ve not read the third one. I’ve read the other ones, and I’m a big Lord of the Rings nerd, so I get excited whenever someone references any of those books. So that’s awesome. Now let’s switch gears and let’s dive deeper into the company and the product. So maybe let’s frame it this way. So let’s imagine that I’m on the medical affairs teams. How am I articulating that problem that I’m trying to have solved when I start working?
Dipanwita Das
Sure. So I, or rather my company, has just spent maybe about eleven years and $2.6 billion to take a new product to market. I’m convinced from the data that I have seen so far that this is going to be a blockbuster, which means it’s going to make 16, $20 billion. Basically, it could be a Fortune 500 company unto itself. Just that one product. Now I’ve taken it to market, I need to make sure that every key opinion leader, aka every influencer for my product has all of the data that they need in a timely manner, in a digestible format to a prescribe my medication, because without prescription, there’s of course no revenue. And more important for my work in medical affairs, no patients will get treated.
Dipanwita Das
Medical affairs, as you know, is much more focused in the business of treating patients, not just making money or not making money at all. It’s mainly focused on patients, which means somebody needs to write a prescription, and that’s very important to me. At the same time, once my drug goes to market, people are writing about it, they’re writing research paper, they’re talking to my field reps, they’re on advisory boards, people are presenting at congresses. I need to make sure that all of this data that’s being generated about my products and about my competitors products are collected, unified, analyzed and then turned into information, which means turned into things I can use to take decisions. And I need to be able to decide whether I need a new publication because there isn’t enough data on dosage.
Dipanwita Das
I need to be able to tell my team if there is a potential new indication emerging that is there another use for this product that I just took to market? I need to know if there are adverse events coming out of this use that I had not previously known of. Particularly. I also need to know if my influencer is moving from I know nothing about your product to I’m an evangelist for your product. So here I am with an MD, a PhD, a pharmd, ideally maybe even multiple of those titles. I’m doing all of this manually. I have some data subscriptions. I might be using a consulting firm to generate some of these reports. But sitting here today, I do not have a control center, a command center, a workstation.
Dipanwita Das
I do not know that I have omnichannel, aka complete visibility across all of my data in near time. I know for a fact that I need to work faster and do more than I’m able to do manually. And most hurtful, I cannot currently measure and communicate the analytics behind the work I’m doing and the impact it’s having, and also what gaps might be emerging. Because traditional bi tools don’t really work for me. Those are the people that come to us and they’re really looking for can you actually handle all of my data? Can you give me scalable workflows? And can you help measure how.
Brett
Big is this market, just so we can understand what that looks like, at least for the segment of serving medical affairs teams. How big is that market?
Dipanwita Das
So life sciences analytics, which actually goes a little beyond medical affairs. Our wedge into the life sciences market is medical affairs, but we don’t only serve medical and scientific affairs teams, but our market sizing is about $51 billion globally. This does not include healthcare analytics, which is a separate space, and it is also growing roughly at a 29% keGR.
Brett
Wow. So is the strategy there to initially start with medical affairs and then work your way up?
Dipanwita Das
That is absolutely right. Medical affairs is a part of the larger commercialization team within life sciences. So in addition to sales and marketing, which is the classic commercialization team, medical affairs plays a massively important role because they have the remit to be able to talk medicine with doctors and sometimes have conversations that can go beyond just marketing language, which means they actually have a finger on the physician’s pulse, on the researchers pulse, and our SMEs themselves. So with this drive towards evidence based and value based care, doctors, insurers, patient advocacy groups, regulators, they want more data and they want it from this team and these teams, because really, medical and scientific affairs are about eight to ten different sub teams.
Brett
Did you know from day one that medical affairs is going to be that initial focus? And the reason I ask is a lot of founders struggle with making that decision. Okay, here’s the segment we’re going to start with. Yes, it’s much bigger than this, but for now, we’re going to focus on this segment. So for you, was that day one clarity or did that take some time to really decide that?
Dipanwita Das
We knew from day one that medical affairs was going to be one of our customer bases, but we spent still the first three ish years looking at other and running pilots and tests with other verticals as well, insurance and otherwise. So yes, we both did, but we still ran a test.
Brett
And what’s this market category going to be, do you think? Maybe three to five years into the future? It sounds like life science analytics is the main category, but is there a subcategory that you’re either creating or you’re part of?
Dipanwita Das
I think that there is an emerging category in life sciences, one that exists in other markets. It’s that customer experience analytics. So the voice of customer analytics, if were to describe our key product, which is medical insights management, to the average consumer or investor, they would hear voice of customer analytics, because that’s really what we do. We bring in all the data channels. We help you plot your customer and know exactly what they need and when they need it. I believe that medical analytics is likely to splinter from the larger life sciences analytics and become a category unto itself. And that’s really the category that we are pushing to more. So create and hold.
Brett
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Brett
When it comes to AI, what are you doing right now to rise above all of the noise? And what I always tell guests here, or joke about is I have this thing called, like, the mom test. So, technology, I know that it’s really getting mainstream as soon as my mom asks about it. So at some point in 2016, she asked about crypto. Then she asked about VR, when meta rebranded or Facebook rebranded. And then when Chatchpt came out, she texted me and asked about AI and chat, GPT and all of that. So AI is obviously everywhere. Everyone’s talking about it. And I’m sure there’s a lot of companies out there making noise as well. So what are you doing to really rise above that noise and make sure that they know your AI is different?
Dipanwita Das
So, first and foremost, I love the mom analogy you just gave me. One of our customers recently on a call, told my colleague that, hey, you know, today everyone’s talking about LLMs and NLU and all of this, but you guys were talking about it three years ago, and we all looked at you like you had four heads. And I think that the point you make here is very valid, which is, what are we doing about it, right about the noise? First and foremost, we are a product company that is focused on solving a set of business challenges. We happen to use a series of AI services to power various product features and to be able to handle and make meaning of some of this very specific, gnarly, scientific, medical, biomedical content that our customers handle.
Dipanwita Das
So our choice of using AI, not just one model or one service, but several, was driven by this kind of content. At the end of the day, that does not lend well and will never lend well to a pure manual processing. So one of the things our customers love about us is everything we do and talk about AI. It’s compliant, it’s transparent, it’s audited, it’s benchmarked, it’s enriched, it’s tuned to their domain. So when we bring AI to the table, it is always surfaced through a product feature. It’s solving a business problem, and that’s what our customers focus on. And that’s really helped us rise above the tide. In fact, we just won an award with our partners for our work with AstraZeneca’s oncology team on literature monitoring as one of the standout or zeitgeist applications of AI for medical affairs transformation.
Dipanwita Das
Which means at the end of the day, we know we’re rising above the noise when our products are making real changes.
Brett
Yeah, that’s a great indicator. What about growth and adoption? Are there any numbers that you can share that highlight the growth that you’re seeing? Our audience loves hearing metrics, but of course, understand that you’re a private company, so only share what you’re willing to share publicly.
Dipanwita Das
Sure. So we took our first product to market in early 2021. Today we have a suite of three products in market. We have grown over 400% year over year. And in this year we’re experiencing some crazy growth across our product portfolio.
Brett
What do you attribute to that growth? Because it’s funny, a lot of the companies I work with are in cybersecurity or B2B tech. And that’s not the case. Everyone is just getting pummeled and destroyed. It’s been a painful year for a lot of the founders that I speak to, but sounds like it’s a different case in life sciences. Is that fair to say?
Dipanwita Das
It is and it is not. I think it’s both. One, is that our beachhead or the team that buys us first? That is medical affairs. We have been sort of prepping and educating that market for the last two and a half, three years. It is one in which there aren’t that many software players. There are software players, but not that many enterprise SaaS startups. That education is starting to bear fruit. So I would say in 2021, in 2020, people were a lot more skeptical about buying a product without seeing proof of that product being, well, fully baked. And so we didn’t have the privilege of throwing around mockups and doing a very immature iteration and having any material customer adoption.
Dipanwita Das
So I would say the first thing that is accelerating our growth is that we actually have a product with features that does things and that they can start using out the gate and seeing value. Number two, it’s a small industry. Everyone talks with each other. It’s both a big and a small industry. Everyone talks to each other. Which means once the top three customers begin to use us and start talking about us, the other ones follow. Third, I think that we’ve made some smart moves in our go to market, where we both go to market directly, and that represents the majority of our deals. But we also go to market with partners because we recognize, most important, that our customers have traditionally bought services and have depended on expert consultants to be able to do their job.
Dipanwita Das
And they’re not going to go away and in fact they’re going to need them. But the shape of that will change. So in marrying software with the services that they’re very used to and in fact need, it’s made it easier for them to adopt us. These are three of it. I would also say that us being an AI company with legitimacy does help. You’ve correctly pointed out there’s a lot of rubbish out there. So us being able to prove what is under the hood has been another driver.
Brett
What about messaging and positioning? How have you seen that evolve over the last twelve to 18 months? Have there been any major changes?
Dipanwita Das
Huge changes? I like to joke that my company probably changes entirely every six months. I do it faster if I could, but I’m afraid our heads would explode. We just redid our messaging exercise. And one of the things is the way I would say our messaging has shifted over the years is it started out with a vision for a transformed industry and it a projector or design of a suite of products and things that could power that transformation. And customers loved it and they bought into it, but they needed to then see it. So then we had the next generation of our messaging, which was much more specific to the product or the application we had in market at the time. Publication monitoring can support you in XYZ and you can measure your publication impact on clinical practice. So very narrow.
Dipanwita Das
So went from very wide vision to very narrow. And now, again, it’s gone to somewhere in the middle where we still speak to that transformation, or we’re speaking to the transformation of the industry and our customers and their working environment again, and we’re thrilled to bring them on that journey. But we’re still very specific about the ROI that people can get from each of our application. And that balance is now more so coming to the front.
Brett
And what is that ROI story? And the reason I ask is, again, I talk with founders a lot and that’s the huge focus. Now, what a Founder told me last week was, it doesn’t matter who you’re selling to right now, you’re selling to the CFO. At the end of the day, ROI matters a lot. So what’s that ROI story look like for you? And how do you measure and prove.
Dipanwita Das
Out that ROI so consistently across all our applications? What our customers get is faster, which is obviously very measurable. And we actually do run tests with our customers. So, for example, if they were spending three days doing something, they’re now spending 2 hours doing the same thing. So it’s a very simple ROI. Typically I would say it averages 92% faster. Next is it cheaper? And cheapness for them is important, not just because of belt tightening per se, but because if it isn’t cheaper, then the adoption or the friction of adoption might not even be worth it. This is not exactly a poor industry. So it’s cheaper. It’s cheaper for them to use a single piece of software rather than have a collection of tools and data subscriptions, and also pay consultants and also hire people.
Dipanwita Das
Also, our customers are extremely highly trained professionals, which means their cost to company is in there aren’t even that many of them, so it’s not a cheap talent. And third, is better quality. And this is the part that really powers the strategic vision. They are able to have insights into their data, their customers and their products in a way that they were never able to do before. And they can measure it. They can measure what visibility they have now versus before. They can measure what articles they can jump into now that they couldn’t before. They’re now able to see trends in real time across geographies, and they’re really able to locate their KOL across all of their channels. So those are the three things that our customers measure. But I think cheaper, faster, just out the gate, and then better qualitatively makes.
Brett
A lot of sense, and I can see how that moves the needle. Now let’s switch gears a little bit and let’s talk about funding. So, as I mentioned there in the intro, over 20 million raised so far. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey?
Dipanwita Das
That is such an interesting question. I kind of knew you’d ask that, and I was thinking about how I might answer it, so I’ll break it up into bullet points, as one does. The first thing I’ve learned about fundraising is that it’s entirely different stage to stage. The fundraiser’s background and storytelling, particularly early on, is vastly more important than what they’re presenting. And this is something that many of my early investors have reminded me of over the years, that if I saw my first pitch deck, I might run screaming. So really what you’re doing with your precede investors, if you have precede investors, is that you’re establishing your credibility as a person and your dependability as a keeper of their money. That’s really what you’re doing. And that wasn’t very clear to me early on.
Dipanwita Das
I will admit it took me a little while to catch on to the fact that they were really investing in me and my team, and I do have two incredible co-founders. So me and my team and my co-founders, rather than in this business idea, because they knew it would change. I think the second thing I’ve learned about fundraising in obviously, Sorcero’s had both the privilege and the misfortune of having to grow a company, primarily through a pandemic. So, yes, we have grown, and we’re amazingly happy about that. But it’s also been extremely difficult. You really cannot build relationships on Zoom.
Dipanwita Das
So one of the things that did hurt us was the fact that not only were we in DC, which was removed from many of the traditional funders, but you couldn’t build a rapport with ABC or an investor over 30 minutes to sort of get them to just trust you to write you a check. That means that in the middle, it was very hard for us to raise AC and Na without having just blowout traction. And so that was just a hard journey. And again, having vision alone wasn’t good enough then. Today it’s changing. We’re getting ready to raise a b, maybe early next year, maybe in the late fall this year. And this is all about metrics. So, yes, the vision still matters, but the numbers really matter and the customers references really matter.
Dipanwita Das
So that, I think, lends itself better to a primarily virtual environment, because those are somewhat more objective measures of excellence. So I would say that’s sort of been our journey and how my mindset has changed. And I sometimes joke I make a better later stage Founder than I did a precede storyteller.
Brett
Do you think you’ve gotten much better at storytelling now?
Dipanwita Das
I don’t know. I think I am much better, yes, but I am also. I think it’s such a personal thing, storytelling. The approach to storytelling, has to really marry with your personality. And I think there’s a part of me that has been really trained in being extremely accurate, extremely grounded. So bloviating is very difficult for me. So I need a lot of data to back up what I’m about to say. And I think number two is I sometimes struggle with frames of reference, so I could refer to a series of books and concepts and ideas that are very familiar to me, but if it isn’t to my audience, it’s going to land flat. So, yes, I am better.
Dipanwita Das
But maybe these are the two areas where I’m still working on frames of reference that will resonate with everybody and also being comfortable with staking a position or a claim and owning it.
Brett
Let’s imagine now that you were starting the company again today from scratch. So, based on everything that you’ve learned over the last couple of years, what would be the number one piece of advice you’d give to yourself?
Dipanwita Das
Spend all of your time just building your team. Just really do that. The right team, the right two other people is more important than about anything else you’re going to do because you’re most likely going to pivot, you’re most likely going to change, you’re most likely going to shift. But your first two, three, four hires, if you’ve made the right ones, can accelerate everything and save you so much trouble.
Brett
Final question for you, let’s zoom out into the future so we can go three years, five years, ten years, however big you want. What is that big picture vision that you’re building?
Dipanwita Das
So, first and foremost, my team and I really want to build a company that endures. And with that, whatever that point in the future is that we are at as I speak, Sorcero will be considered the command center for Life Sciences. Product commercialization, supporting accelerated adoption of life changing drugs, making sure that patients who need it can access it expediently. Physicians know how to handle it and how to make the best of it, and that regulators are able to get true data to be able to support the commercialization of these drugs. Most important, we collect stories, and we have had a few of our investors come and tell us personal stories of how they used Sorcero to craft and to change and advocate for more appropriate treatment for themselves.
Dipanwita Das
Most of all, I hope that we’re sitting on many more stories, maybe hundreds of stories, of how our product, through various levels, really impacted a patient’s life.
Brett
Amazing. Well, I love the vision. I love the company. I love everything that you’re building. And I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. I’ve learned a lot from you, and I think founders who listen in are going to learn a lot from you as well. So we are up on time, and we’ll need to wrap here. But before we do, if there’s any Founder listening in who just wants to follow along with your journey as you build and execute on this vision, where should they go?
Dipanwita Das
A thank you very much, Brett. For those who are listening, if you want to follow us, please follow us on LinkedIn and also our website is ww sorcerero.com. So sorcery, just replace the y with an o. Amazing.
Brett
Well, thank you again for chatting. I really appreciate it and wish you the best of luck in executing on this vision.
Dipanwita Das
Thank you, Brett. It was a pleasure.
Brett
All right, keep in touch.
Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search forCategory Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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