Babylon Health CEO Ali Parsa on where ambitious scale-ups should go next
2023-06-14
Moving into new regions is a sure-fire way to learn, and hopefully earn, too. But when plotting your first international expansion, should you go to a like-for-like market, or do something more difficult instead?
Babylon Health CEO Dr. Ali Parsa suggests the latter. The billion-dollar business founder recently joined us at our Centuro Global Expansion Conference for a keynote fireside chat with Guil Hastings, Founder and Non-Executive Director at TopSource Worldwide. And in it, he explained why he decided to expand his healthcare business into Rwanda first, rather than tackle a more similar market in Europe.
Addressing a packed house of global expansion experts, he said: “We all talk about global expansion and we all talk about serving everybody. But when it comes to the time of making the decision [of where to expand to], we often take the easiest path. So we say ‘I want to build a global company’, but then we say ‘What is the country that is closest to my country; France, Germany, or wherever, and let’s just go there?’ But what do I learn from a country that is immediately just the same as my country? Almost nothing.
“If you want to truly learn how to be global then you want to go somewhere that is diametrically the opposite, and say: ‘Can I actually learn [from] this one?’ … from Rwanda, we went to the Far East, and from Far East Asia we went to Canada and the United States and it was always about ‘can I learn enough to globalise?’…. We thought if we can solve the problem for a rich country and if we can solve it for a poor country, then it really makes us unique.”
Ali shared some incredible insights throughout the half-hour speaking slot, including how living as an immigrant had shaped his thinking, and his desire to democratise healthcare via Babylon Health, a $1.1bn revenue digital healthcare services provider. He said: “Our concept was can we make healthcare accessible, affordable, and put it in the hands of everyone on earth? Can we deliver most of the healthcare most people need on the mobile phones they already have? In 2014 that seemed much harder than it does today.
Dr. Parsa explained his global mindset was informed by a belief that the primary motivations were the same for all humankind. He said: “It doesn’t matter if you’re rich, poor, young, old, insider or outsider you have exactly the same needs and the same desires. You just have different opportunities. If you believe that people have the same needs everywhere, then this idea that: “This is just for the rich” or “this is just for the poor” is absolute nonsense. And you just serve every human being as if they are a human being.”
He continued: “If you believe this service works in the United Kingdom, then why shouldn’t it work in Rwanda? If you believe a mother and a father in the UK want the best healthcare for their child, then a mother and father in Africa want the same thing for their child.”
He also advised fast-growing scale-ups on how to achieve buy-in for their ideas. He said: “When you create something new most people don’t believe it can be done and therefore you start doubting yourself. It’s important at the beginning to give it the intellectual rigour it needs… never believe your own theory until you can prove it works. That’s as true in business as it is in science.”
Zain Ali, Centuro Global CEO, said: “We received so much incredible feedback on Ali’s talk, with the word ‘inspiring’ coming up repeatedly. Ali is an entrepreneur that is delivering not just financial returns but also social rewards – and truly helping to ‘level up’ society. We are so grateful that he gave his time to share his insights with our audience.”
You can see Ali’s full keynote session here. A second blog regarding Ali’s thoughts on AI and technology can be found here.
About Centuro Global
Whichever new geographic market you go for, Centuro can make things simpler. Our AI-powered Centuro Connect platform delivers everything you need to know to stay compliant on immigration, tax, and legal entity. This one-stop-shop gives you certainty on compliance, while saving you time and money as you grow overseas and move people and resources from country to country. Contact us to find out more.
