Escobar Health: Reimagining Cocaine Cartels as Venture-Backed Health Tech.
Let's face it, blow is broken.
Everyone talks about how important mental health is. If I have to hear the phrase “everyone has mental health” one more time…
I apologize in advance to my neighbors. This is for the inevitable noise complaints you will be forced to report. Let me save you some time: DoNotPay has automated this neighbor-complaint process.
An irony? Tech companies are funded if they are founded by individuals who look suspiciously like teenagers.
Teens who have somehow graduated b-school. Only these individuals were allowed to “disrupt” industries. Thus, we have had an endless stream of companies founded to solve problems that are easily explained but unimportant.
The truth about healthcare? Serious companies in the space are unbelievably big. The top five unicorns listed on the Crunchbase unicorn list are just south of the market capitalization of UnitedHealthcare. Combined.
South of #15 on the same Crunchbase unicorn start-up list, each and every one of those companies has a market capitalization that is less than the free cash flow of UnitedHealthcare every month.
Health tech start-ups need to solve bigger problems if they’re going to generate real value over the long term.
I get it, people want medicine for their problems. It should be easy. As an absurdist journalist, I realized that my role in health technology itself presents a built-in conflict of interest. If I'm going to write about my industry, I can't make too many enemies! It's important to be disruptive, but not at the cost of disrupting anyone's feelings.
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Cocaine for “low peppiness” would have amazing traction in the market. I mean, there would be some regulatory issues. Pablo Escobar may have been a lot of things, but a “poor evaluator of product-market-fit?” No. He was a disruptive innovator.
As a Founder, he “disrupted bribery”—instead of the endlessly inefficient process of offering a bribe, and then having a person bargain. He went with a novel “go-to-corruption” motion: Either take a fixed-price bribe (“silver”) or be shot to death (“lead”). It is even catchier in Spanish:
“Plata o plomo?”
Founders identify problems to solve. “Imagined Founder Pablo” wanted to solve for the lack of energy in the “barrio space.” He rebranded this health problem—a la Pharma--as low peppiness. It might even be the 6th vital sign..
Heck, the rating scale: done. Let’s just use it now, it’s not like there are standards…
What about the fact that anyone can lie about their “low peppiness” symptoms? This is a feature. Maybe we'll even call it “low pep” for short?
Imagine the Marketing Meeting!
Somebody can throw a football around in the ad? Oh, I got It— maybe our protagonist is even too tired to continue throwing the football back and forth! The ad can end with the football again being passed back-and-forth… after doing some blow!
“For guys with low pep, get back in the game!”
Selling cocaine for a made-up medical problem is a traction hack. However, my actual point: even cocaine trafficking is small potatoes in healthcare.
Pablo Escobar's cocaine empire generated about $4 billion in revenue. Even with a price-to-earnings ratio on par with UnitedHealth Group at 22.4, it would only be a $90b market cap. UHC alone is half a trillion dollars. I would argue, that’s the kind of milestone we should be shooting for, not just acquisition targets for Leviathan.
Only twice have I ever heard of cocaine having a genuine medical use. Once, it was in Ophthalmology to test the response of muscles surrounding the pupils. The second time was a pain clinic in a very unfortunate location, (which I will NOT name) where a physician used it for chronic maxillary sinus pain.