The first 10 trillion dollar “company” will be an Indian Healthcare Alliance
in at least one timeline. how do we make it ours?
As AI commoditises knowledge work, the share of GDP consumed by healthcare will naturally grow larger, from its already massive 10.3%. This will be one of the final accelerants to the natural arc that ends in the ushering of the age of longevity and a world economy that no longer assumes death as one of its fundamental axioms.
This means the timeline for the world’s first trillion dollar company in healthcare, to join the ranks of the Magnificent 7, is closer than many think. This is not entirely novel, it was not so long ago that a16z commented the same was bound to happen in an underrated essay that quickly fell under the shadow of the LLM summer.
I will venture, as always, to be more interesting than a rehash. I will likely come off as provocative, to many in the Valley and elsewhere in the First World, who have grown comfortable in their constant underestimation of the Third World and her ability to build and innovate. I say that not only will we soon see, in the next decade, a healthcare company1 cross 1 trillion dollars in valuation, but that this $1T+ powerhouse will be Indian born-and-brought-up, in roots, heart and soul.
Entertain me for a bit more, though, for I think that’s only the beginning. Indian capitalism, like many of her Asian counterparts, is radically more networked and interlocking than the corporations in West, witness the Japanese keiretsu or the Korean chaebols. You see this already in the intergenerational conglomerates like the Tata Group ($436B) and Reliance Group ($230B). Yet, there is something way more interesting than familial dynasties writ in the chai leaves, spelt with an acronym that suave global commentators are growing familiar with — UPI. It turns out that building interoperable and shared protocols that anyone can build and trade on allows you to catapult past the boring bank-and-cards driven gated financial systems into the far more exciting world of inclusive digital finance. Even more exciting is the meta-innovation primitive this uncovers - that you can have generative and free innovation borne from competition without the winner-take-all dynamics and inefficiencies of siloed monopolies. And while better plumbing for the movement of capital is a very good, useful, and necessary goal, nothing really compares with the finish line of eradicating sickness from the world and the bringing-forth of immutable good health.
So, allow me be way bolder than earlier, for it is not the season to be shy.
There will be an Indian “company“ that will outmuscle and outshadow her global technological and energy siblings, and by 2047, will power her way to be the world’s most valuable “company” period, and the first one in the history of humanity to be worth over 10 Trillion Dollars. Though at that point, we may refer to it as reaching a 1000 Trillion Rupees.
Given the sheer size of this behemoth, it will likely not look like the companies we take for granted as the status-quo today. In its purest form, it may look like an Alliance, a ‘mycelial’ network of interconnected companies of providers, pharma, (re)insurers, diagnostics, logistics, medical-devices, software, data and AI players all working towards a common end-goal. In the best-aligned version of this, the Alliance’s bottom line benefits the most from the longer and healthier people live. And as AI, robotics, and manufacturing all become increasingly commoditised and edge closer to the limits of physics, chemistry and materials, extending human health and life span will be the endless frontier driving forward economic growth, with the Alliance at the cornerstone of the new global (and perhaps interplanetary) economy.
At the very least, you have to grant that this is, at least 1, of the infinite timelines that branch out from the moment you read this. So how do we make it ours?
There will quite possibly be more than one healthcare company that gets to $1T by 2035, such as Eli Lily if they invest/double-down on their trove from GLP-1 well. The Indian company may not necessarily be the first, but nor does it need to be for everything else to remain true.