Luká Yancopoulos Podcast Transcript
Luká Yancopoulos joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to the digital executive today’s guest is Luká Yancopoulos. Luká Yancopoulos, CEO and co-founder of Grapevine is an entrepreneur with a track record of innovation and consistent delivery in the healthcare industry as CEO and one of the faces of the company.
Luca is involved at every level of grapevines operations, securing funding, innovating on the platform and looking for ways to take the company’s offering to an even wider market.
Well, good afternoon, Luka, welcome to the show!
Luka Yancopoulos: Hey, Brian, I’m very excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. This is so fun.
I appreciate you making the time hailing out of the great state of New York. Always a fun time on a podcast no matter where I do this, but I appreciate again, you making the time. So, look at jumping right into the question here. Could you share the story behind Great Minds Inception? What inspired you to co found the company and specifically target the challenges you saw in the healthcare industry?
Luka Yancopoulos: Yeah, sure. I mean, I’ve got my both. My parents are in the health care industry. My dad’s a scientist. My mom’s a nurse. And for me, I was called to action by some of their needs. They were facing the onset of the pandemic. I was merely a college student. But I saw my parents facing real issues and it wasn’t issues that they were equipped to solve, nor they’ve been trained to solve.
They were healthcare professionals, you know, specialized in patient care and solving patient problems and curing people of diseases. And when, you know, the pandemic struck, those frontline workers became struck with a problem of their own, a problem that would affect them and patients alike, but not something they could solve.
And that was sort of a supply chain failure. It was something they didn’t have time to handle, especially during a time of great crisis.
Brian Thomas: Thank you, and I appreciate that every podcast here has such a unique story, and I love every single 1 of them. But the fact at the end of the day, there’s a problem that needs to be solved in a lot of times people aren’t looking at it that way.
It’s just that they’ve had some sort of experience sometimes. You know, not negative, right? Traumatic and it creates this need for the person or people to create something that will alleviate the pain or, or again, like I said, a solution to the problem. So, I appreciate the share on that really do and Luca healthcare facilities rely on giant suppliers.
How does grapevine help them escape and save?
Luka Yancopoulos: Yeah. I mean, giant is the right word. And another word I would, I would add to it is, is old. We like to think of them as distribution dinosaurs, McKesson’s coming up on its 200th year anniversary, almost as old as our great nation of America. And yeah, no, my, my friends here, we, we sort of joke about the sort of old habits that have somehow kept their way in the, in the modern era.
And that. you know, billions and billions of dollars of health care industry spenders directed towards. And it’s incredibly inefficient. It’s problematic. It causes a lot of the issues that people sort of face not just during crisis time, but on a daily basis, right? Medical practices, 10, 20 percent of their annual expenditure is on medical supplies.
That’s not including even, you know, a lot of the drugs used in in the clinical setting, and it doesn’t need to be that way. A lot of those costs come directly from the middleman, his markup and supply chain inefficiencies. You’ve got a right in this day and age to be able to shop for different sources and make sure that you get the smartest source every time you need to buy.
And if you do that, if you were to go into every store that sold, let’s just say your favorite cereal, right? Every, every different grocer, you know, within a 20 mile radius of your, of your local home, and you went into every store and you looked at the prices on every single box of cereal, same brand, you know, same size.
Across those different stores, you would see different prices. That’s not a secret. A lot of these mega healthcare distributors like to keep information siloed. They like to keep their prices behind a closed door. They like to lock you into a contract as a healthcare as a healthcare business, and that’s not the world that we’re living in, in 2024.
So, it’s grapevine’s responsibility to help break down the walls. Between your suppliers, right, give you increased optionality without an increased headache and make sure you get the smartest source. Every time you add something to your cart.
Brian Thomas: I love that. And there’s so many inefficiencies. And we talked about this a lot on the podcast, whether we can leverage blockchain, which I think is amazing.
And I think it really applies in supply chain. But AI and other things could certainly help cut into that cost that supply costs. But also, we do need to look at the middleman. There is a lot of that going on across every industry, especially in healthcare. And I’m a healthcare person as well. I’ve been in a long time.
So, I appreciate your insights on that. Luke, I really do. And look at managing lots of suppliers or sounds really messy. How does grapevine keep it simple for hospitals?
Luka Yancopoulos: Well, I think you hit the nail on the head with one of our key special ingredients, and that is AI. Right? When you come online to Grapevine, and you sign up for free you basically link the suppliers that you previously worked with.
And when you do that, you just type in your credentials to Henryschein.com, to McKesson.com. It’s a Medline.com and all of your orders from all of those suppliers immediately flooded same with your contracted prices. We rapidly learned what specialty you’re in, how much you order and what GPOs you might be a part of.
And some of those things might not apply to you, but maybe they should, because when we look at the items that you previously, what did we look at the prices? We say, hey, there’s a business just like you right down the block or right around the corner, maybe halfway across the country, but they’re the same size.
Maybe they were part of the same GPOs, or maybe there are parts of GPOs that you should be a part of. And we basically give you a checklist, a very easy checklist that can all be done and completed in a few clicks to basically leverage the lowest possible prices that you can access because someone else has prices better than you.
You should be able to get those prices too. And you might never know that someone is paying 75 percent less on the same exact item from the same exact supplier and. Information is sort of our job, right? So, we give you a place to aggregate that information. You shop it as if it’s a single supplier.
Meanwhile, you’re tapping into all the suppliers you would ever need and connecting with hundreds of new ones. And we make a really simple Amazon style checkout experience to shop, you know, hundreds of suppliers in a single screen. And if you ever do add the wrong item to cart or you add an item to cart and it’s a terrible deal, that’s where we show a simple pop.
It says, Hey, maybe you should switch and save right? And it shows maybe the same product from an alternative source or maybe a cost saving substitute an alternative brand.
Brian Thomas: I really love that because in the middle of the day, especially if you’re a procurement specialist, right? You’ve got a lot of stuff to order, and you don’t have time to shop around. Obviously, especially if you work in a large hospital, been there, done that, yeah. So I appreciate really you leveraging the technology to make shopping, as I would say, or procurement much simpler and obviously saving the hospital’s bottom line. So, appreciate that. And then Luca, last question of the day, what big changes are coming to healthcare supply chains and how will great mind stay ahead of the curve?
Luka Yancopoulos: Yeah, I mean, the changes that we’re, we’re hoping to implement is to liberate all healthcare businesses of ever having to. Place an order again, right? Let people kick back and focus on patient care, focus on cutting edge medicine, focus on being the best possible clinician that you can be and not spend hours or thousands of millions of dollars, right.
On trying to optimize or manage this beast called supply chain. No, we, we see a world where you’ve got forever stock. Your inventory shelves are always full. And you don’t even lift a finger or click a mouse to make that happen. And all the while we build a trusting relationship, an unbiased relationship.
We don’t hold stock. We don’t have inventory and we are not a supplier, right? We build a trusting relationship with the healthcare providers that we will always get them the best deal. We don’t make money off of. You know what source they buy, and we don’t push you towards a house brand because we make an extra buck off of it.
You know, our job is to keep your stocks, your shelf stocked and to make it as minimal effort as possible. And we want to do that while making sure you get the best possible price every single time and you’re not getting gouged when gouging is a thing that continues to happen long before and long after the pandemic.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. The price gouging has gone way out of control, and we’ve seen very lopsidedness, especially with the federal funding. We’ve seen a lot of cases where the people that really need it never got the money and the people that may not have needed the money certainly took, I think, advantage of the system and, and we’ve got to continue to work on that.
And there’s people like you, entrepreneurs like you that are making the difference because we’re diving in. Tackling the problem, you know, across, across the whole spectrum and not just leaving it up to some, you know, bureaucracy or some agency or government agency to kind of weigh in on this stuff. So, I appreciate that.
That’s, that’s huge, especially to the patients that really need the help. So, Luka, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Luka Yancopoulos: Thanks, Brian. It was great to be here. Thanks for the opportunity.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Luká Yancopoulos Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
