Elliot Moss
Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today, I am very pleased to say, is Hamish Grierson, Co-Founder and CEO of Thriva Health, the home blood test and health check service. While working at Travelex initially on a placement as part of a programme for aspiring entrepreneurs, Hamish met future Co-Founder, Eliot Brooks. Due to a high cholesterol condition, Eliot was frequently asking Hamish for time off to get blood tests. Hamish realised the current healthcare system wasn’t empowering people to take control of their health. Inspired by a new wave of fintech companies, Hamish, Eliot and friend Tom Livesey, launched Thriva in 2015, providing personalised blood tests and GP reviewed results in 48 hours and equipping people with insights about their bodies to help them live healthier, longer lives. Thriva has supported over 2 million people across the country to manage their health, through its direct to consumer service and through partnerships with Government, NHS hospitals, insurers, GPs, private doctors and nutritionists. It’s great to have you here.
Hamish Grierson
Thank you very much for having me on.
Elliot Moss
2015 seems a while ago, a lot has changed in the world. I mentioned briefly the Government piece. I didn’t mention Covid-19 but of course that is relevant. Before we get onto that and other things that happened during lockdown, talk to me about why this business was set up by you back then.
Hamish Grierson
The very short answer is that what we saw then, and I still see it now, is that most people, not just in the UK but certainly in the UK at a minimum, do not know what’s happening inside their bodies most of the time and that has a range of very negative consequences. Everything from, you know, identification of disease later than it should be, to people you know ultimately feeling disempowered to build that connection between you know my day-to-day lifestyle decisions, how are they actually flowing through to my biology and you alluded to in introduction, you know we were observing back in 2015 this fascinating development within fintech where organisations, TransferWise, Monzo, Revolut, businesses like that, they were building effectively consumer centric versions of traditional models. So they were placing the individual at the heart of the experience, treating them like an adult and bringing the customer with them on that journey and I had become personally fascinated by health. I’m not clinically trained or from a doctor based background but I had fallen in love, personally, with different forms of dieting and fasting and cold water exposure, the things that you can do day-to-day that just make you feel better and ultimately, provide you with better health and I suppose it was the fascination with how that stuff was evolving, as a personal area of interest, coupled with Eliot’s experience with blood testing and those two things, as they came together, made it very clear to myself and Eliot to begin with and then myself, Eliot and Tom that actually, there is no reason that we should live in ignorance and we went out to say is there a technological solution or a methodology perhaps that would enable us to change the way we engage with our health.
Elliot Moss
And you found the technology?
Hamish Grierson
We did. I mean, the thing that we ultimately discovered is that the laboratories who process samples over the, you know, 25 years plus running up to 2015, they had gradually been evolving the machinery that actually runs the sample and analytics to require smaller and smaller sample volumes. Now, people often think, you go to a GP let’s say and they’ll draw out, you know, a couple of vials, big vials, worth of blood but practically, the amount of blood that will be used to run let’s say a diabetes test, has gone down to something like half a droplet’s worth of blood so, truthfully, unbeknownst until we started looking at it closely, the change in the technology was getting to the point where because the sample volume was coming down, you could then say well, perhaps we can ask people to collect those now smaller samples themselves at home and accessibility is one of the cornerstones of how we think about our place in the world, you know you have to be able to do this stuff more easily if you are going to be able to change the way people engage with their health.
Elliot Moss
You mention you didn’t have a clinical background or you’re not a medic, your degree was in, it was at SOAS wasn’t it?
Hamish Grierson
It was. It was a degree in International Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies.
Elliot Moss
There you go, SOAS, a fine place and a great degree to do too. Did it ever dawn to you in those early days that you weren’t medically trained or was it actually the best thing ever for setting up a business like this because you weren’t going to get knee-deep in the medical side?
Hamish Grierson
I think ultimately it was a huge advantage and I say that because on the one hand we had to bring in very, very early to the process, the clinical expertise that we knowingly didn’t have and needed, and we brought in you know senior medical people from day dot. However, we were laymen in the very purest sense and I think the reason that that was advantageous is that if we couldn’t understand something then we felt fairly sure that the average person that we wanted to be adding value to, probably wouldn’t either. So it was a pretty good filter for building things that real people outside of the medical profession would be able to get their heads around.
Elliot Moss
And for you, you mention cold water swimming and you mentioned diets and stuff like that. Why were you personally, if not medically trained, why were you so interested in those things? Do you recall, was there a reason from a family point about why you were so concerned about health?
Hamish Grierson
Actually, it was a different starting place, it wasn’t concern…
Elliot Moss
You were just optimising this fine figure of a human I see in front of me.
Hamish Grierson
I can assure you it wasn’t that either. I mean it was back in the probably twelve months before I got married. I’ll come on, there’s a little bit of the back story that sort of kicked in a bit later but actually the jumping off point for me was in a curry house about 200 metres from where we’re sitting, I sat down with a friend of mine called Jamie who was looking better than I’d ever seen him look, he was just you know full of…
Elliot Moss
He was glowing.
Hamish Grierson
He was glowing. Good way to describe it. And he was sitting there having a pint and a curry, hence the curry house, and what became very clear is that he wasn’t having any rice and he was drinking cider not beer, which for me was fascinating because he sat there and for probably an hour, talked to me through the very basic reality of paleo dieting and the jumping off point was so profound because I could understand the biology, I got the mechanical process that was unfolding internally and for me probably, as is the case for millions, dieting is historically, it’s where you don’t eat and you are hungry all the time and yet he was saying, “I eat like a horse and I’ve lost a bunch of weight and I’m working out a little bit and actually, I’m lifting houses in the gym. I just feel brilliant.” So I, 24 hours later, started down the rabbit hole of getting really interested in what became a whole plethora of different things and then as I started trying to myself get in shape for my wedding, I though maybe I’ll give this a go and I think the thing that was profound for me was the speed with which, a) you can do this stuff because it’s basically free and b) how quickly you see and feel the changes. And that just ignited this sense that we are so much more in control than perhaps we sometimes appreciate but equally, we sometimes don’t have the measures that would be helpful in augmenting our understanding of where we are.
Elliot Moss
You’ve done a bunch of stuff before Thriva and just listening to you talk then, it strikes me that there’s a different vibe to this one, which is to say to your point inspired by your friend in the curry house, you can put people in control, you can be in control much more, your own health, physical health is absolutely critical and why not change the model, why not go down the route and you mentioned Monzo, you mentioned TransferWise too. Taavet has been on the programme weirdly and so has Tom Blomfield. That in control thing is still driving you, I’m assuming that is still why Thriva is pushing forward.
Hamish Grierson
Yeah, a 100% and you know I’m very lucky that we have developed since 2015 into a business that whilst we do continue to add value to people who come to us directly with the Thriva brand at Thriva.co, we also now power – and it’s probably the bigger part of what we do – third party organisations, some of which you touched on. And that for me is critically important as part of how we achieve that vision of empowering people and providing them with that control because practically, health is a continuum, you know people are not always well and they’re not always, fingers crossed, sick. So, you have to accept that to add that value, you have to create a solution that can map to the continuum and what that means practically, to sort of make it a bit more real, is reactive healthcare, the sort of traditional primary and secondary care that we know and love, why is it if you are in touch with a GP or a hospital or a specialist of some kind that you are suddenly robbed of the sort of product capabilities that we’ve created for people who are perhaps slightly more well and actually we don’t want to rob them at all, we want to empower people whether they are unwell, trying to get well or they are more well, trying to stay well. For us, they are simply two ways to achieve the same ultimate goal.
Elliot Moss
Common sense but quite difficult to execute for millions of people but you sound like you are doing it. Stay with me for much more from my Business Shaper, it’s Hamish Grierson, he’s the Co-Founder of Thriva, he’ll be back in a couple of minutes. Right now we’re going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Academy Innovation Series, they can be found on all the major podcast platforms. Natasha Knight invites business founders to share their industry insights and practical advice for those of you thinking about getting into an industry and starting your very own thing, just like Hamish. In this clip, focussing on the health and wellness industries, we hear from Ruby Raut, CEO and Co-Founder of WUKA, the UK’s first eco-friendly period underwear brand.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and indeed you can hear this very programme again if you pop ‘Jazz Shapers’ into your podcast platform of choice. My guest today is Hamish Grierson, Co-Founder and CEO of the digital health company, Thriva. So the three of you get together, you do your stuff, we’re here now eight years later, I think if my maths is right, give or take. In that first year or two, did you think you were going to make it?
Hamish Grierson
I think the one thing that entrepreneurs have in common is just massive optimism and…
Elliot Moss
Is it real optimism though, Hamish or is it sort of constructed and manufactured in a house near you?
Hamish Grierson
I don’t think that it matters. I think that sometimes you have to manufacture it to get through a difficult day but ultimately, there has to be a core truth to the optimism and that we’re very lucky, we get to work on a problem space that by doing well, we’re helping lots and lots of people, so there’s a sort of motivation beyond just the financial and it certainly helps to get you out of bed in the morning. You know, it was, you know tough old early days, as it is for all small, nascent businesses but I was personally incredibly lucky. I do not know how people start their first proper scale-up businesses on their own, I had Tom and Eliot and we were so mutually reliant on each other, you know when an investors says no or you get a negative bit of feedback from a customer or just stuff that happens, we always had each other to be able to prop one or two back up and somehow, it always worked out that at least one of us was feeling strong, so the sort of median average was probably that much higher as a consequence.
Elliot Moss
I’ve read a lot about the fact that you want to create this trust between people doing the thing they do at home on their own when not in front of a GP or a medical professional and doing that in the same way that you self-serve in the financial world and you talked about, you gave a couple of examples before and that changing of the dynamic and putting people in control. How have you done that because having worked in some of the biggest companies in the word with consumer brands where every brand manager I have ever met says, “You’ve got to build trust” and I always say trust is an outcome, it’s not the thing you say, “Trust us.” How have you managed to do that in this environment, where it’s so, where the stakes are really high, where if it goes wrong or people perceive that you’re charlatans or something, it ain’t going to work.
Hamish Grierson
Yeah, I mean it’s a bedrock of how we’ve built the business, both in terms of the internal culture, which is probably where it either starts or stops, you know I think we probably saw what happened with Theranos, which was I think primarily a culturally derived outcome.
Elliot Moss
It’s an extraordinary story. I listened to the whole podcast series and I was like, I was absolutely blown away that someone had the front to do that.
Hamish Grierson
Yeah, and its culture, right and I think that’s why embedding a cultural sort of North Star, right from the get-go drove us to operate in the way that we do today.
Elliot Moss
How did you get to that North Star, out of interest?
Hamish Grierson
Honestly, I think it comes from the characterial realities of the Founders. I don’t think you can manufacture it and we were setting out to do right by people, you know we wanted to leave the world better than we found it and that sounds like a trite thing to say but there comes a point where, you know, you get your mettle tested because you might have to move a bit more slowly and it might cost a bit more money but it’s the right thing to do because it makes people safer or you’re making the data more secure or you’re helping to navigate some sensitivities. So, from day one, we you know, we’ve had the patient or customer first mentality; trust being an absolute bedrock of how you do that. And I think the obvious thing to say is, I mean again touched on it a little bit, but bringing the requisite level of clinical input, you know we’ve now got a phenomenal clinical team and indeed, you know, from data security to the patient safety, clinical escalations, you know all of the things that actually are mandatory to deliver a safe service and an effective service. We’ve brought the right people in to ensure that that’s exactly what we’ve got. I think the final thing to say is we’re very pro NHS. I think people sometimes assume that all the startups in some way shape or form must be anti NHS because they are disrupters. Quite the reverse. We want to be able to ultimately alleviate some of the current pressure on the NHS so it can get back to doing what it was designed to do, which it does phenomenally well when it isn’t having to deal with a whole bunch of extraneous pressure. So, we’ve had NHS trained GPs provide commentary on all of our results, as an example, and we work, as you said, with the NHS, we work with some hospitals and some GPs and practices as well, so yeah, it’s about being part of a system and helping it rather than standing outside and throwing stones.
Elliot Moss
All of us, wherever we were in the world and whatever we were doing for a period of time under the extraordinary pandemic moment, were in a very different place in our lives and some businesses thrived, some businesses were under incredible pressure. Your business, a remote healthcare business, sounds like it obviously did well – I say ‘well’ in inverted commas – but specifically, you were working with the NHS, with Government, to deliver these antibody tests. How did it feel? I don’t, I want to phrase this carefully, how did it feel sort of benefitting from an absolutely awful situation or did you not articulate it like that at the time?
Hamish Grierson
I think, you know to wind the clock back to the early part of 2020, there was a total war time mentality that everyone felt, and we were front of the queue, and there was no concept of it being a good thing for anyone at all, I think it’s probably fair to say for a fairly long period of time and one of the first things that we did was to effectively create a sort of skeleton overview of what we’d built and leave it with whoever we could because we had no political connection, to say, ‘look, we’ve built this system for doing home testing, we’ve got no idea whether it’s going to be useful’ – this was you know kind of pre-mega test and trace programmes – ‘but we’ve built this platform. If it would be useful, call me and I’ll tell you how we’ve done it, so you can do it’.
Elliot Moss
Who did you send that? Was it an email you sent to someone or something?
Hamish Grierson
It was, I think it was by hook or by crook to someone in the Department of Health. I have a vague recollection that it was an Under Secretary that someone, one of our investors happened to know.
Elliot Moss
Someone who knew someone, who knew someone.
Hamish Grierson
Yeah, it was properly circuitous and eventually the phone rang after we’d been invited to be sort of participant to this diagnostics group input to Number 10 and everyone sort of said, ‘look, we have been told that it’s impossible to do what you’ve said that you can do’, to have one relationship, and it was the Department of Health, the DHSE, who were the ones ultimately picking the phone up to us, and they were I think having a really challenging time themselves trying to manage a whole slew of different suppliers on the PCR testing side, entirely understandable, you know that programme gets a lot of negative press but you know what they stood up over the short period of time that they did, was phenomenal but it was also really difficult because they were having to manage so many suppliers. So, here’s Thriva, effectively saying we have built, whilst we’re a small company, we’ve built this big capability in terms of processing because we’re the technology glue between the constituent parts of the remote diagnostic supply chain, so we can be a single supplier for antibody testing to the Department of Health and you know, I think to be entirely honest, they probably had to come at that very sceptically because we were a pretty small player in the ecosystem, so we spent a long time going back and forth ultimately showing them what we’d built and after, you know, a fairly intense period of you know four, five months it became clear that we had done the work with our suppliers and the amazing work had been done on the assay, so the actual test itself, and we were, we were ready to turn this programme on and it was, you know for us as a business, it was really risky because were so small, quite rightly, underperformance on the programme was going to be penalised quite heavily so we had to nail it and I was really confident in the team and the technology and they did, they absolutely nailed it and it played a really important role in informing the Department of Health’s understanding of the serology levels, i.e. the antibody levels, across a whole slew of different cohorts. So, you know, it was a phenomenally intense period of time and we just happened to have built the thing that they really needed and delivering it was intense, you know we had to make sure it was absolutely right but…
Elliot Moss
I can still see the emotion in your eyes because to me, I’m just listening and it’s choking me up a bit because the impact of what you did, coincidentally, because it wasn’t meant to happen like this, is extraordinary.
Hamish Grierson
It really wasn’t, yeah, and I think anyone will certainly admit to the fact that of course no one saw this coming and there is no preparation that you can do for an event like that and there’s lots of you know potential versions of the story where we didn’t have the thing that could add some value to and what the Department of Health were trying to attack and create solutions around but we did and we demonstrated that whilst we, as a company, could be small in number, I think we were sort of fifty, sixty people at the time, using technology and working with really capable partners, who themselves were fantastic, we could do something that became, I think it’s fair to say, the Gold Standard internationally in terms of national level surveillance programmes, you know, it was something that I think the Department of Health should be incredibly proud to have constructed. But no, no one could have seen that coming, right? And actually, I think the most fascinating consequence of it all is that what it left behind was a legacy that on the one hand of course, you know we hope we’re better prepared for the, for the next one and generally speaking, it seems to be it’s when not if, but also people’s awareness of diagnostics and what you can do in the home, that’s moved forward probably ten years in the space of two and I think that’s ultimately a good thing for everybody. Yes, it may be you know good for us as a business but I think actually, the much more important take away is societally, we needed that to happen and there’s going to be a, I think a very encouraging set of consequences as we start to see more of that come to fruition.
Elliot Moss
I think you should be incredibly proud. I’m sure I’m not the first to say that to you. Final chat coming up with my guest today, it’s Hamish Grierson. We’ve got some Oscar-winning music from H.E.R as well, that’s in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
Just for a few more minutes, Hamish Grierson is my Business Shaper, we’ve been talking about extraordinary things that happen in serendipitous ways when you, you know, you were doing a bunch of stuff and suddenly the pandemic comes along and you were able to help. I think you were able to help because you’d been a) building a North Star, which was really clear and real and authentic and b) as you said, you became the gold standard, it was the gold standard way of testing for antibodies because you’ve got quality in your organisation, in the business. How have you managed to get to that level of quality and how are you going to manage to sustain it going forward?
Hamish Grierson
I think it harks back to culture and you know, we have in every single person that we onboard, I take them through a presentation, one slide of which is very explicitly articulating the Thriva, at every turn, is scientifically backed and grounded in evidence. There was a period of time where perhaps you didn’t need to tell people that but in the sort of post-fact world that it is sometimes described as, we certainly feel that it’s important to remind people and make it unmissably true that when you work for Thriva, whilst like any business we’ve got to find the path to customers and you know stay light on our feet and change things to make sure we’re constantly improving the value that we add, that agility can’t come at the pace of quality and that does sometimes and then you’ve got to slow down and take the hard path and that’s just what you’ve got to do and you’ve got to figure out how to bring your investors and your stakeholders on that journey with you but generally speaking, it’s a very difficult one to argue with.
Elliot Moss
On the other side of quality and being focussed and being determined and doing all the things you just described, there’s a big sacrifice that happens for you as a human, as a person with kids and family and all that, and I think I’ve read something that you have said you’ve looked that in the mirror and gone that’s, that’s going to be hard, I’m not quite as present as I want to be. How have you squared away that sacrifice with this notion, and I’m just going to read this to you because I think it’s one of your quotes, it’s talking about “a society that should be surely about the life in the years, not just the years in the life.” For you, in the life in your years, how are you managing this pursuit of quality in your work life and the pursuit of quality, I imagine, in your own personal life?
Hamish Grierson
Well, less expertly than I probably would ultimately like to and I think it’s, it’s the pursuit of continued improvement on that front that probably does keep me, keep me going. There’s two things that stand out. Number one, I have the most incredible wife and nothing that I have done or we have done, I believe would have been possible without her, yeah, she is the absolute bedrock of our family and I’ve been incredibly fortunate to be able to borrow from her strength, to enable me to you know try to change the world with Thriva alongside Tom and Eliot and the other is, I try to practice what I preach and I am still very interested in health and I now…
Elliot Moss
He’s a fine specimen I may say. You look very healthy. 104 but you look much younger.
Hamish Grierson
I’ll pay you later. So, you know, I woke up this morning and had a cold shower and meditated on the train and you know I try to do the intermittent fasting and you know stuff like that. So, I’m very unpreachy about it because I will regularly fall off the wagon and maybe get onto a different wagon and try something else. I believe it’s more of a sort of toolbox approach than anything else, you just need to find what’s relevant at the time. So, I try to stick with it and maintain a healthy, operative word, balance between you know doing what I need to, to show up as a father and as a husband, also recognising that building a startup’s hard yards.
Elliot Moss
It’s been really good to meet you, Hamish, and thank you for your time. Just before I let you go off for another cold shower and another special bit of food you’re going to eat which is going to perfectly be in tune with your body and your mind…
Hamish Grierson
It might be a burger.
Elliot Moss
It might be a burger, probably will be a burger, which is good because you’re normal. What’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Hamish Grierson
So I’ve chosen a track by African Jazz Pioneers, not that my accent betrays it but I am actually South African by origin and I was born and raised in Hout Bay which is just round the corner from Cape Town and I was very lucky to grow up in a house that had lots of music in it and one of the bands that just seemingly was on repeat, was the African Jazz Pioneers, so I really struggled to select a track from the album but I’ve gone for the one that I have because for some reason, it just struck more of a chord than some of the others and the reason in particular for me it was pertinent is, I don’t think I have listened to them for about 32 years and for some reason, I just got this lightening bolt memory and chucked it into Spotify, thinking that this is a really long shot, I doubt they’re going to be on there and of course they were and it was, you know music has a fairly profound sort of memory trigger doesn’t it and I was whipped back to being five years old in Hout Bay, probably faster and more powerfully than anything probably since I left and so yeah, it’s got a real emotional connection for me.
Elliot Moss
The African Jazz Pioneers with Ten Ten Special, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Hamish Grierson. He talks about treating people like adults and putting you, the human, in control of your own health. He talked about optimism and how it is predicated on purpose and a really strong sense of purpose and whether it’s manufactured or not, it doesn’t matter as long as you’ve got that North Star. And finally, really interestingly, he talked about being part of the system and specifically, part of the NHS system. You don’t have to go against the system to disrupt it. Really great stuff. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds of more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to Mishcon.com/JazzShapers.