DGTL Voices with Ed Marx - Listen, Learn, Evolve, and Repeat (ft. Jay Modh)

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

On this episode of DGTL Voices, Ed welcomes Jay Modh, CEO of Intuitive.Cloud, discussing his personal journey, the evolution of his company, and the current state of digital transformation in healthcare. Jay shares insights on leadership, the importance of innovation, and the challenges faced by the healthcare industry. He emphasizes the need for collaboration between providers and life sciences, and the role of technology in improving patient care. The conversation also touches on personal growth, work-life balance, and the significance of gratitude and mentorship.

Thanks for tuning to Digital Voices podcast, where we chat digital transformation challenges and opportunities across healthcare and life sciences. And now, your host, Ed Marks. Hey, everyone, it's Ed. Welcome to another edition of Digital Voices. I'm with a friend of mine, Jay Mo. Jay, welcome to Digital Voices. Eric, thank you for inviting me to your podcast. Really appreciate it.

I know, this could be really fun because. Jay and how we first met. I think we probably had met when I was at New York City, health and hospitals, the CIO, you were doing some work. But it really wasn't until in the last couple of years, we realized we lived in the neighborhood next to each other, basically. In fact, the other night, Zimmer and I were out, and you and your family were out at the same rush. You know, you're running to each other. So you're a friend, but you also do some great work in healthcare and other industries that we're going to talk to as the CEO of intuitive cloud and intuitive VC.

But Jay, the most important question people want to hear the answer to on digital voices is what's on your playlist? What kind of songs do you like to listen to? So I am not very musical, but I do like good music from, you know, likes of Billy Joel, Freddie Mercury, A.R. I'm, lately I've been listening

to a lot of, you know, meditating music and trans music inspired by what my life is doing. So, yeah, it's, you know, a lot of music, but I'm not particularly into any specific type of music. But, yeah, these are some of the good songs that I listen to. Yeah, that sounds great. What about life message or mantra?

Are there words that you live by? Well, that's my favorite question, right? Anybody ask me this. I can go on for a whole day. But a simple answer to that is, from very early on in my life, I'll learn to live intuitively. life. Interestingly, intuitive is not a marketing term we come up with when we started the company.

This is how I lived my life. The extrapolation of what is intuitive life is living a debt-free life, personally, emotionally, spiritually and financially, giving your best as if it is your last day and waking up to make positive impact to everybody's life around you is generally my principle. If I ask myself, did I do well? And if the answer is no, then I'll try to do better next day morning. The second mantra that I've learned through experiences is to listen. So I have a favorite quote that I always put in is listen, learn, evolve, and beat. And last thing is my job as a leader is to solve difficult problems, not to talk about problems, only focus on solutions.

These are the three things that I live with. And I'm happy every single day just following this principles of life. Yeah, I love them. Those are awesome. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Like, where did you grow up? So I'm born and brought up in Gujarat, which is a western state of India, where Prime Minister Modi comes from as well.

Was born and brought up there. I grew in the state. Came to U.S. when I was 21 years old. I started my studies that in Stevens, in Hoboken, did my master's in network information system and cybersecurity. And then, you know, did a lot of consulting. I ran a consulting business, you know, but in terms of early part of life, unlike most of the young generation today who are very sorted and, you know, I figured everything out. I was in an exploratory mode all the way until maybe 23. 24 years of my life. So that's the journey of, you know, and the growing of it.

Yeah, and you married this beautiful woman and you have a couple kids, right? Tell us about your kid. Yeah. So first of all, I married to somebody who was really carved the path for me. She has been my partner in everything I have done and really the reason why I'm able to do what I'm able to do. And obviously, with that partnership, we have two kids. One is my daughter, which is junior in high school, varsity golfer, amazing kid. And then I have a second one, which is a boy, he's 10 years old,

still like me, is figuring out his life. So we are what we call seekers, not believers, right? So we are in quest of figuring things out, even today. The same thing goes to my son. While my wife and my daughter

are quite sorted and they figure everything out so they know what they're doing. So, you know, great family, blessed to have a wonderful kid. And more importantly, all the parents, all of our four parents, mine and Reyes parents, are with us, helping us navigate through life as well. So I'm blessed with everything that we call family. Yeah, that's really neat.

Yeah, it is a great family. I can attest to that. So you graduate, you're on the East Coast, you've got all these different degrees. How did intuitive cloud come about? So, Ed, when I, again, this is going back to my childhood, right, I always had this desire to, you know, solve difficult problems and make things better. It doesn't matter what it is. If it is a sandwich, I want to make it better, right? And that was always the desire and the wish, right?

So that led me to want to do a business that is enterprise focus, scale involved, it has a bigger impact. And, you know, it may sound good today that I have law for it to figure out, but when I was, you know, starting the business, the design was really to say, hey, let me do something that is beyond just me and it's scalable and it can grow multiple over the years. It drives success that I can make impact for my customers and for my employees. So that was really the idea. It was not very deep. In doing the business, the goal was, look, let's find our niche, let's create a special value that others are not able to do. And that was really the idea of starting my own business. Yeah, and since that time, you've grown into multiple industries. Tell us a little bit about

each of the industries. Because when we talk about transformation and health care in a little bit, I want to ask you a question about the different industries and how they might compare to one another. So what are some of the verticals that you're in? Yeah. So intuitive, again, we are what we call innovation, engineering company, right? Our core mantra is to solve technology problems that evolved into us focusing on business problems. So today we solve business and technology problems, leveraging innovation and hardcore engineering in technology space. We are supporting today, majority of our business comes from three major verticals, right? So healthcare life sciences is one of the largest

vertical group that we have. Second one is banking financial services and insurance, and the third one is heavy industries. These are the three major verticals that we support. And what we do is we do cloud, cybersecurity, data, AI, ML, platform engineering and product engineering. That's core of our business. Again, healthcare is getting a lot more attention today by overall industry and even

at Intuitive and why obviously, you know, we have been getting advice and guidance from you and few of the leaders in the healthcare industry. How would you say healthcare compares to the two other verticals that you're helping out? Are healthcare, are we ahead of the game, are we around the same when it comes to digital transformation, or are we maybe a little bit behind? So in my view, healthcare is a little bit behind compared to ISV and financial services vertical in terms of adoption of true digital efficiencies, right? But on the flip side, what I see is that now that leadership in healthcare has evolved and changed a lot.

So the CIOs, the CTO, the Csos have now years of board and boards are now much more aware. So they are making significant investment. So if I have to say, next five years, I think healthcare is going to grow, in multifold and they may catch up or surpass other industries because, you know, innovation is now front and center of healthcare industry. Again, look at yourself and many of the leaders that I have met, you know, in the network. Everyone is talking about AI. Everyone is talking about cybersecurity.

So the awareness of how we improve continuum of care, how do we improve patient experience and patient engagement, I think that has now gone to the next level. So yes, while healthcare today is slightly behind financial services and ISV verticals, I think, you know, next five years is going to be where healthcare is going to go much faster compared to other industries. Jay, I know that you have many high-profile healthcare clients without naming any. What are some of the top priorities? You may have mentioned them already. We talked about AI and cybersecurity, but are there other top priorities that you're seeing in some of these forward-thinking healthcare organizations?

Yeah, so this is a good question. So in healthcare, I always tell people, right, if you want to really make change, right, and you want to drive innovation and transformation, your intents and goals have to be very clear, right? Otherwise, you are running in a given direction without a goalpost. I think the goalpost is defined now for the healthcare vertical. and it starts from, you know, major healthcare providers, you know, their profitability is very thin, right?

So they're focusing on how do we make our healthcare practices efficient, where we are providing better care to patients while we still remain in the business, right? So there are more of operational use cases that, you know, health care vertical is focusing on, right? from, you know, solving this whole physician fatigue and the burnout that is happening, which is a major challenge, as you can see, there's a lot of pressure on those, you know, doctors and nurses today. The second major thing that we see is that there are a lot of inefficiencies today in making care available to patients, a lot of back and forth on prior authorization

and ensuring, you know, disputes that come after the patient is treated. with insurance companies. So a lot of those administrative overheads that is burning the physicians and even hospital administration out. So there is a heightened focus on that. That is one area. Now, leveraging AI to solve those problems

is a technology solution, right? And making sure that it is secure is a cybersecurity solution. Leveraging AI and making sure that use of AI is secure and responsible for healthcare administrative efficiency is one of the biggest driver today. that we see. The second area that we see is that providers and the life sciences are partnering

together very well in creating the actual solutions or the cure for the patients, right? That is an area that we see significant collaboration now, right? So to me, I've, you know, intuitive as a company is working with life sciences and major providers together. So we see that collaboration that's driving a second major area of transformation in health care. The third area that I see is the actual care, right, the treatment of patients in radiology, cardiology, many of the different facets of the actual care that patients need. We see tremendous amount of transformation. We ourselves are involved in building solutions for hospitals and for surgeons and physicians to inference the data in helping them with a lot of meaningful insights in how they can cure the patient, right?

Some of the things that we're doing is we are actually witnessing life surgeries and we are collecting a lot of the data obviously in the bounds of HIPAA high trust and within customers' environment, whereas environment, but we are really seeing that how do we drive the efficiency and accuracy in care, right, which is where we are, you know, sort of augmenting the physicians and surgeons with more meaningful information. So I see three facets. Administrative, actually care,

clinical side of the AI and, you know, securing the AI and collaboration between the provider and the life sciences coming up with the cure and medicines and the treatments that is going to improve that. So call it, the innovation and transformation is happening across the continuum of care and lifecycle. Yeah, yeah, that's great. I think that's spot on.

You know, Intuitive has been around for a few years now, Jay, what's one thing? I know there's a top of your head you could have a dozen, but maybe what's one, two things that you're most proud of? So, Ed, one, number one, we have earned the trust from the technology leaders, and now we are going next level in earning trust from the business and finance leaders. that would not have been possible without delivering measurable results for our customers. We are noticed by every major executive out there. And more importantly, our customers are now speaking for us and introducing us to their peers in the industry. So to me, that is something to be really proud of. It would not have been possible without, you know, tireless efforts of my team,

delivering absolute solid execution for the customer. So that is one. Second one that I'm proud of is that we have evolved ourselves from being a technology services company to become a business consulting company. We now are not focusing purely on network security and platform engineering DevOps and migration to cloud. Those we do. But the intent is now focusing on business problems. Hey, if I'm working with a healthcare provider, what is that business problem and how do we dissect that into a technology

problem and technology solution. We learned this very well in the last three years and today, I can probably say that we are actually a vertical focused business and our conversation with our customer is much more relevant to their business challenges. So those are the two things I don't say we're proud of and as a result of it, we see a lot of industry leaders wanting to now work with us and collaborate and partner with us. And as a result, we brought just this year in 2024, we have brought eight industry leaders to the team. And you know, right, we were introduced recently.

We brought business leaders and we brought actually for healthcare, since this is more relevant here, for healthcare, we brought actually practicing physicians and surgeons on board to intuitive, to help create the solution that the major providers would need. So I'm proud of the accomplishment of the company and the trust that we have, earned for ourselves across the customers, as well as the industry leaders wanting to help us grow in multi- Yeah, that's a big testimony for sure to your success is when your customers are introducing you to their peers. That says quite a bit. Now, I know that one of these clinicians that you alluded to that come to the company is actually your brother. And in your greater family,

the majority of your family seems is in health care on the physician side. You chose a different path in engineering. Tell me about how that happened in your youth, I suppose, where you made this choice for a different path and what prepared you for your role today as a CEO? Simple answer is I'm not as smart as all of them. I mean, I'm serious. My brother, my cousin, a lot of these are doctors.

These are very fine, intelligent, individuals and professionals, and I was genuinely not as good as them. So I could not make it to medicine. It's a very competitive space, especially in India, to get admission into vet school. But on the flip side, as I said, I was always driven by the impact I can make at a steer. That is just one simple thing that drives me. If anybody presents something to me, my first first thing. question would be, is it scalable? Is it just limited to you? Or there are other people under your leadership can manage and grow the business or even the practice? And the answer was in medicine.

Now, obviously, the world has evolved a lot where doctors are doing much more than just treating patients. But back, you know, 24 years back, 25 years back where I had to make that decision, it was not really that clear. So I chose a line and the field which would allow me to scale multiple and I can create a larger enterprise. So that was really the driver to do what I did. And again, as I said, I did not know all of the things that I do today that it wasn't even possible. I took help of my intuition and just followed the path. And, you know, one thing after another kept on happening, I got supported by an less number of people. So I'm not a self-made man. I am a person who's built by lots of people and then help and the support is

what made me who I am and proud of what I've achieved, but there's a lot more to be done. This is just the beginning. Jay, what would you say to people listening who are maybe earlier in their career, but one day they think about starting their own company or becoming a CEO? So what are one or two things that you would say to an aspiring leader to help them grow? I'll say first of all, be honest with yourself, right? You kind of have to ask yourself a question. Are you a innovator? Are you a leader?

Are you good with execution? Or you are an individual contributor, right? Being confused with your own strengths is not a good idea. That's number one. Number two, being a founder and CEO is not at all the easiest job. There is a saying, head is heavy, which very, very, is the crown, right? I may have been butchering up the saying, but the idea

is that being a CEO and being a founder, creating a business all looks very sexy and in people's eyes, but it is not easy. If I have to count the number of sacrifices I would have made and for being fortunate to be supported by a wonderful spouse

and a larger family, it's not the luxury that everybody is fortunate with, right? So there is a lot that you're going to have to sacrifice, but be very clear with your intent. If your intent is, yes, I want to make difference. I want to change the world. I want to create a, you know, value that others are not creating and I want to create a change. You have to be the change to make it happen. So yes, if you are, if you're a person who is passionate, driven,

and you have your goals clear, it does not have to be perfect goal that you're going to reach, but your goal is, you know, at a macro level that, hey, you want to do something impactful, then be a CEO, right? You can create an impact in other ways, but there are people who are sometimes misguided. So my advice to everybody is be honest to yourself, know your strengths and weaknesses, play with your strengths,

and repeat what works. That would be a genuine advice to aspiring leaders who are looking to be founders and our CEOs. Yeah, that's great. Jay, what's one thing that you learn the hard way? So, and I, you know, the slogan that I like a lot now, listen, learn, improve, evolve, and repeat, right? That actually came from a lot of bad experiences or a lot of failures. Being a founder, you get very passionate and possessive about the business that you have built.

And your ability to trust others to do the same thing you are doing is very little. And doing so, I actually lost a couple of really good leaders and friends in business because, you know, I would not have relinquished the control to them or trusted their ability to lead. Eyeside is always, you know, 20-20 and, you know, you can always find the right answers when you look back in the mirror. But I would say that taught me a good lesson. So I have now trained myself to listen to others, learn from them, give them a space to lead and deliver the outcomes. Obviously, you still measure the outcomes. You don't have a blindfold, but give people space to leave.

That is one thing that I've learned the hard way. And I'm generally very self-critical. So that is one thing. The second thing that I have learned is you don't have to be the answer for everything. You don't have to be the solution for everything. Bring experts in the space that they are known for, right? So one of the mistakes that I made early on is I didn't bring on the right finance leaders and right legal leaders. And we actually paid a lot of happy price for that.

Instead of focusing on growing business, we ended up, you know, taking a lot of our time in doing operational work, which we have corrected now. Last two years, we've made lots of investment in bringing right leaders in the team. So I would say those are the two things that I've learned the hard way. And I encourage everybody that hire the leaders that you trust, hire the leaders that you're going to give their space to lead, and bring the experts. You don't have to be experts at everything. Yeah, that's great. And Jay, you're a lot. You've obviously done a tremendous amount to build the business, and we all know it takes

a lot of effort as you were sharing. How do you kind of take the time for yourself to recharge your batteries and remain fresh? You know, because, again, you've got Priya and you've got your children. You know, how do you do that? How do you have that sort of balance as you can? So I said, I'm blessed with a lot of good people around me. They are my sort of voice of reason, right? including my business partner,

Andy, somebody who's been instrumental in our success of our journey, Mirali. So Indisha and Mirali at work are my sort of shock absorbers and telling me like, Jay, you need to take a break and, you know, sort of, you know, stay back, let other people do the job. That lets me stay calm and recharge batteries when I come home. You know, the family is full of fun

and laughs, right? So they keep me away from just being, you know, 100% of the time being in a business more. So, you know, the work, my friends and partners at work and the partners at home are the ones who are really helping me recharge my batteries and be ready. And the largest team of things, what makes me happy is that I can now feel that I am actually making very positive impact to a lot of people's lives around me. And that's really what, you know, that happiness is what brings smile on my face. So, you know, there are days that I've not slept for 36 hours and you see the same smile

on my face. You know, so it's multiple facets to how do I stay focused, clear, fresh, and energized to go make it next day more. Yeah, makes tremendous sense. Jay, we've talked about so many things. We started about your life message and mantra after we talked about music and the intuitive life, which was great, which is about living debt-free in all aspects of life, spiritually, financially, financially, those sorts of things. And then talking about you growing up and your family and the things that make you tick. We spoke a lot about intuitive cloud, how it started, and the things that you do.

We talked about healthcare and transformation. You laid out fabulously sort of the three areas where healthcare is heading where you're seeing a lot of your customers going. And then we talked a lot about leadership because this whole takes leadership to work about impact at scale, being honest, the things that you learn the hard way. And finally, how to recharge your batteries. What did we miss or what would you like to double down on? I'll give you the last word. So I would say two things. One, the day through this medium, I want to thank everybody who has been a contributor and instrumental for my journey.

Being grateful is very much important. in today state, we take our friends and family for granted, and I urge everybody that do not do that. Prioritize your family and your friends, people who have made positive impact in your life, pick up a phone, call them, thank them, and be grateful. There is no better feeling than that for you and for them. So I have a ton of people to thank and be grateful of including you, right? You have, just knowing you for some time, you have actually helped mentor my daughter, you've supported her journey that she wants to go in a match school and pursue that career and you've been instrumental in helping.

I'll start with that and go down to everybody who has brought me here. Second is paid forward, right? We all need to carve a tie and mind share to be able to pay it forward. What I have learned, mistakes and, you know, good and bad thing, right? You can teach a lot from talking about your mistakes and your vulnerabilities. That makes you a better leader. Most people talk about successes. I like to talk about failures because there is a lot to learn.

I have learned a lot from other people's failures around me, and I'm blessed to be even actually be supported by them. So the young generation today is quite short. It is our responsibility to help them cut the path, drawing guidance when needed. and make an impact, right, where they don't need to really taste the poison to know it kills them, right? We kind of have a play a role and say, guys, look, we've been there, done that. Here is a piece of advice that may help you not repeat a rookie mistake, right,

or the first time entrepreneur or leader mistake. We can help them. Those are the two things I would want to add in here and, you know, sort of call it. That would be a message that I would want to give through your meeting. to everybody and all this. Well, Jayette's awesome. Thank you so much for being our guest on Digital Voices. Thank you, Ed.

I really appreciate you taking time and putting this efforts in. I have a lifelong fan of you and a follower of everything that you've done. Your journey is truly inspirational. So, you know, thank you again for even considering me to be on your podcast. Truly appreciate it. Thank you for listening to Digital Voices Podcast. with Edmarts. If you enjoyed this episode,

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