by Martin Edlund, CEO, BillionScale Health

Scale is rare, because it’s hard. Our goal is to build a repeatable engine to “billion-scale” solutions – from new technologies to overlooked commodities to AI tools and new financing- and delivery-models for health.

With the recent Artemis mission, the world is thinking about moonshots again. We need to do the same in global health.

When launching moonshots, liftoff matters most. As one of my mentors Ray Chambers likes to say, “If you get the propulsion and trajectory right at launch, you have a good chance of reaching your target. But if you get that critical first phase wrong, there’s no recovering.”

That’s why BillionScale Health is focused on the first 300M people reached by a given solution. That’s where the hardest, most creative work happens. It’s in reaching the first 300 million people that you figure out:

• Product Improvements, rapid and incessant in this first phase, radically improve the impact profile of a solution and cut costs.
• Market Shaping does the same for affordability, reducing the cost per person protected by up to 90%.
• Regional Manufacturing ensures efficiency and access as countries take up solutions proven by their neighbors.
• Catalytic Capital crowds in investors and supports countries to move from initial implementations to national scale.
• Delivery Innovations create a playbook for reaching priority populations affordably across public- and private-sector channels.
• Proven Impact gives the rest of the world the confidence to level-up their own ambitions and invest their own capital to adopt solutions.

We want to be catalysts, not completists. After the first 300 million people reached, we can shift to enabling, amplifying, sharing learnings, and cheerleading for a given technology. And working toward the next moonshot, of course.

A final note on moonshots. The term has become synonymous with Silicon Valley thinking: with high-risk, high-reward technologies to solve scaled problems with urgency. All that is true and important, so far as it goes, but the recent Artemis mission reminds us that moonshots are ultimately about something else — our shared humanity.

Looking back at the earth from the Artemis spacecraft on Easter Sunday, Astronaut Victor Glover said, “You’re on a spaceship too. It’s called Earth …This is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are, and that we are all the same. And that we have to get through this together.”

That was the quote heard round the world as Artemis made its way around the moon. And that’s what moonshots mean to us at BillionScale Health.

-Martin

Read on: “The New Capital Stack”