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I'm Vishnu Rachakonda.

Some of the questions I think a lot about (Feynman style) are below.

I’m motivated to learn about and solve problems in these realms.

solve healthcare with data through empowering clinicians of all backgrounds, predicting disease, and finding cures.

build a better healthcare system. infuse it with intelligence. solve disease.

Things I think about

1. Personal Development: How can I systematically drive positive change in society and in the world while balancing personal responsibilities and relations? In other words, how do you be a good citizen and a good person? How do I improve productivity and time allocation so that I can engage in multiple intellectually diverse and meaningful projects using techniques like deep work? How I build a life that is fun, meaningful, fulfilling, challenging, and financially rewarding? How do I adopt process over specific goals and avoid passivity along the way? How do I live intentionally?
2. TechBio, Healthcare AI, Value-based care: What fundamental advances and trends in medicine, biology, and computer science are maturing to the point that they are commercially viable and applicable to saving lives in the near future? What are examples of companies that have successfully built out an interesting business model at this intersection and have actually helped patients? How can current and future initiatives change the structure of healthcare delivery to solve the problems of cost, quality, and access we face now and ensure improvements to human health? How do we ensure that healthcare is not a barrier to health through the effective application of data and technology? What is techbio? How is techbio becoming a reality?
3. Entrepreneurship and Business: What are the best ways to build a long-lasting, technology-based business that balances cultural, product, engineering, and financial success? How do you lead by example, and not title? How do you thoughtfully layer technology into a business model?
4. Data-Intensive + Machine Learning Systems Engineering: What does effective software development look like for data and machine learning? How is developing with data becoming more like software development? Where does it differ? How does this impact the kinds of products and business that can be built? How do you design data and ML systems to become more like software systems; specifically, how do they become more scalable, reliable, and maintainable? How do you build machine learning systems for production use cases? How do you build scalable machine learning systems? What fundamental changes in data engineering are enabling new, better businesses? How do you build a culture that effectively creates technology? What is MLOps? How do you build ML infrastructure?
5. Leadership: How do you lead teams? How do you manage people to success? How do you lead and manage teams and people well to get the most out of them? What is the difference between leadership and management?
6. Foreign affairs, political science, political economy: I am particularly interested in India. How can India's adjust its political economy over the next 20-30 years to create inclusive prosperity as technology, economics, and social pressures evolve? foreign affairs and history. military history. china.
1. “the glib, one-sided conversation about India often encountered in think tanks and corporate boardrooms.”—Milan Vaishnav → I like this quote
7. Higher Education: How can we create a market-driven, student-centric alternative higher education models to adapt to the changes of 21st century economics and technology?
8. Investing and Personal Finance: How do I optimally earn, save, and invest to grow my wealth?
9. Learning and Teaching: How do you ingest and structure knowledge to learn most effectively?How can you use that to teach others?
10. Lifestyle: How do I develop a reading practice? How do I assemble a fun, inventive, interesting, creative wardrobe?

My bio

Background

I came of age during the healthtech boom during the pre-COVID era of 2015-2020. My experiences during this time intimated that there was always tremendous opportunity in changing the way healthcare works. COVID presented an essential reaffirmation of my commitment to advancing human health in ways that are impactful and scalable.

This is a fancy way of saying I really care about helping people get healthier, en masse.

I don't particularly discriminate between clinical, biomedical, or molecular innovation. Value-based care, healthcare AI, or techbio; I'm interested in it all. I expect to have an act of my career in each.

I'm pretty obsessed with this stuff. The best way I can demonstrate how: while I was barely passing my classes in sophomore year of college, I set up an RSS reader that subscribed me to tens of biotech blogs and hundreds of articles. I learned more about the structure and process of biotech innovation through that 1 year firehose of biotech news than I did in 5 years of bioengineering education.

Perhaps my most formative experience in truly understanding the challenge of changing healthcare came in the summer of 2017. Inspired in part by Trump's election the previous fall (as ridiculous as that may sound), I thought it would be pretty interesting to take an internship in the heart of Pennsylvania at Geisinger Health System. I wasn't cut out for the on-campus recruiting grind. I figured I'd learn more being embedded in a healthcare delivery system than I would make strategic recommendations as a junior consultant. What I learned there has deeply shaped the way that I move and perceive health innovation. The deeply misaligned financial, clinical, scientific, administrative and cultural incentives in healthcare showed up in daily meetings with staff and weekly meetings with health system leadership. I can tell you more about it over a long coffee.

Those 5 months taught me more about why groundbreaking science or gargantuan policy shifts aren't enough to change healthcare. Disciplined, patient building that understands what healthcare is, but still harbors dreams about what healthcare should be matters most. It's no surprise that the people who are changing healthcare most are people like Sachin Jain at SCAN Health Plan and Stephane Bancel at Moderna. These are obsessive, rigorous, and insightful people who have earned the right to innovate. I aspire to stand amongst them.

I hope this short essay gives you insight into what truly motivates me.

I value authenticity, discipline, independence, connection, and intention.

Some career highlights I probably should share -> In 2019, I helped publish a study in JAAD that leveraged Reddit to better understand dermatology patient care; this became the catalyst for a failed clinical trials business. In 2020, I joined Identifeye Health as the first machine learning hire and 5th employee; I was there from seed to Series B and learned why hardware is hard. In 2021, I helped the MLOps Community become the world's pre-eminent production machine learning community; we went from <500 to 14K+ participants while I was second in command. In 2022, I joined firsthand, an ambitious effort to change the way those with serious mental illness recover, as the first data hire and 7th employee. In 2023, I am launching the first course on the practical analysis of large-scale claims datasets; we have 28 students from all across the healthcare industry.

Current Exploration Areas

I want to become an n of 1 expert on how to create value using various forms of health data. I plan to roadmap the fundamentals of claims, clinical, pharmacy, and genomics data. With this knowledge, I want to build teaching content that educates a generation of builders in each. With this network, I am to create and empower a series of efforts to change healthcare.

I am excited by the intellectual horsepower and curiosity I will be surrounded by at SPC. Explaining myself and my interests to such brilliant people will make me better and my work more impactful.

The specific directional problem I care about right now-> "What are the major forms of health data that are unlocking in the 21st century? What fundamentals should we know about them? How can we teach these to others?"

Projects

I've started building this claims 101 course that I think can teach 100 people in 2023 and many more in the future. https://vsr.notion.site/Claims-101-Curriculum-af67985b87144b97ba7100bb288bfbc1 I'd spend time at SPC building this more effectively and teaching more forms of healthcare data.

Goals

In my first 3 months, I hope to achieve two aims: 1. Be the historian of the techbio forum. The techbio community is having a moment. Writers like Elliot Hershberg, Morgan Cheatham, Patrick Malone, Shelby Newsad and others are creating a groundswell of interest in techbio. They are defining what it means. With our forum, we have an opportunity to play a part in this movement. We can share our rich discussions, organize insights, and catalyze interest. I offer my writing services to the community as a means to do this. 2. I would like to formalize the first version of my claims 101 course. I'd also like to roadmap the future of incorporating clinical, pharmacy, and genomics data in a way that is compelling and useful. At the end of 2023, I'd like to be at a place where a Health Data 101 is coming into focus. Perhaps some SPC members will teach it with me!

Structured Program

TechBio Forum (Q1 2023)

Structured Program Explanation

You can probably tell from my essay that I care deeply about the fundamental idea of the techbio movement -> finding better ways to advance human health. I'm hilariously crazy about this stuff and would fit right in with the other members of the forum. I'd offer unique experience as a professional with translational insight into what actually matters for delivering the techbio advances we collectively hope to create. For more evidence, check out my blog: https://verosssr.com/