Adam Torres and Ahmed Omar discuss improving patient outcomes.
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Show Notes:
Listen to Longevity Leadership Conference coverage. In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Ahmed Omar, Founder of Sully.ai, explore Sully.ai at the Longevity Leadership Conference.
About Ahmed Omar
As a child, Omar (CEO) grew up watching his mother, confined to a wheelchair and unable to walk. He later understood that her condition was due to a medical error. Similarly, Chaitanya (CTO) endured two years of chronic illness, while Nasser (COO) experienced significant inconveniences when navigating healthcare for his pregnant wife in the Bay Area. Despite trying well-known healthcare organizations, he found that the entire system seemed outdated, more reminiscent of the 1980s than 2024. Recognizing that the market is ripe for disruption, Omar, Nasser, and Chaitanya decided to leverage their expertise in building tech companies and developing world-class technologies.
About Sully.ai
Their goal is to enhance doctors’ capabilities, making them superhuman so they can serve every person on the planet at any given time, similar to how Tesla transformed the automotive industry and Amazon revolutionized e-commerce.
Full Unedited Transcript
This is going to be a fun interview. So I was, as I was researching Ahmed’s background and otherwise, and I’ll read the bio right now, but very diverse background for being a healthcare and a tech entrepreneur. So let’s just get into the bio and you’ll see what I mean. I got tons of questions, but it’s going to be fun.
All right. So Ahmed Omar is the founder of Sully. ai. Ahmed. started selling online, started and really has an MMA background. He became the number one fighter in Egypt, receiving a three time gold medals quickly realized he was more passionate about tech. And in 2014, he left to NYC and built a brand from zero to 55 million in e commerce sales in 3.
5 years ranked number one in Amazon placement. Due to his passion for tech, in 2015, Omar built an app to help consumers find their pictures on their phone in three seconds. In 2019 he met Nassar. Together, they built the number one auto tech startup in MENA, in the MENA region with 55 percent of market share.
After his multiple successes in different industries, Omar decided to focus on healthcare, now building one of the fastest growing AI healthcare startups in the Bay Area called Sully. ai. Sully. ai which is solving the shortage of doctors problems by making doctors a hundred times more efficient.
So first off, Ahmed, welcome. Thank you so much. I like that you have my chief medical officer’s picture instead of mine. But it’s good. I like it. Hey! Who did that? I like it. I’ll take it. I like it. He’s a doctor, though. I’m not the doctor. I’m in. He deserves to be. We’re giving that one to him. Hold on. That’s why Elias didn’t show today.
Right there. Take that. It’s recorded, Elias. We’re coming. That’s awesome. But I like it. It’s good. I like my picture. Background in MMA. I have to get into that part of it. So like, talk to me about how you got started in that, in that world of things. We’ll, we’ll get up to the, up to what you’re doing today, but how, how’d all that start for you?
Yeah, I think I was growing up, I was always fighting with my father. Like when I was seven, I was always fighting with my dad, like be strong with something important. And I was inspired by some of the fighters in the world, but they changed something just by fighting. You know, they influenced a lot of people, so I started fighting, but I was good at it.
I took the first place in Africa four times and did boxing only, and then did MMA. It’s martial arts. Faith for Faith Warriors. It was fun. But I think the most important thing that I enjoyed was the problem solving aspect of it. Like, in 25 minutes, it was the, the enjoyment was, like, the solving the problem of, you know, winning the match.
It wasn’t really that I liked to hit people, or, you know, or, yeah. Had to like it a little bit. Get my ass kicked. Actually, no, not at all. I’ve never had a fight. Yeah, I’ve never had a fight in, like, any bar or any street. I’ve never, yeah. Maybe because of how I look, but But, yeah, like, I usually never, yeah, like, I just liked to And at some point, when I was 19, I went pro pretty quickly.
Like, I was 17, I went to the Cage Warriors, used to team up. Sky Sports. So I got my ass kicked on TV as well, so I’m just gonna have to tell everybody. So I did that and when I was 19, I remember I was selling so in order to do the sport, my father didn’t like it. At some point when he started seeing it being really serious, he was like, maybe you should stop.
You know, you go back home looking differently, right? Like your face looks completely different. It’s not like, who’s, you can ask me who’s that, you know? I’m walking in the room. So, I started selling online to like selling products in Dubai. I grew up in Dubai. I was selling like used products and taking that money and paying my coaches.
You know, to, you know, fight. And then I started making money from fighting. And then I started buying merchandise and continuing selling online. So it was, it was back and forth. But I enjoyed when I saw people using something that I sold. More than winning any fight. So that’s when I knew when I was 19, 20, I knew that I wanted to do something that people use either physical or a digital product that could save something or make a better impact.
And that’s when I decided I don’t want to fight anymore. Yeah. Yeah. So I want to stay in the early days just a little bit longer because I feel like there’s certain themes that, that maybe can, they correlate that to entrepreneurship and I feel like, and I want to hear from you if this is true or not, if some of it kind of carried over and that’s part of the reason.
the success that you’ve experienced. Like, what do you think made you so successful? I mean, to be a champion, like, that’s not hard. That’s a, those are tough sports that you were, that you were competing in and against a lot of people who, let’s just say you had other skills. Some people that are in those sports, that that’s what they’re doing.
Like, that’s what they’re doing. That’s their life. What do you think made you so successful? I would, I would actually say, I would tell you a story. I started fighting and I was, I wasn’t really that good when I started. Like being the number one fighter was something I never thought of. And when I started, I was 12.
As I went, started like being more serious. I one of the most successful fighters took the second place in the Olympics for boxing in Egypt. His name is Mohamed R Ali. They used to call him the Mohamed Ali of the Middle East course. Yeah. So very big guy. He came to me when I was 14 years old and told me you see, like this guy over there, Nina, he’s been training for years.
This guy over there has been training since he was 8. I think you should find another sport. Yeah. And I remember going back home this day and I think that’s when the switch happened. The switch happened. Was that if I take what he told me, I would always take what people told me. And I just quit.
And at this day, I think the switch happened in my brain that, yeah, not anyone, you know, that, even though he’s very influential, I used to look up to him as well, so. That’s like one of your idols telling you, hey, don’t do this. Yes, exactly. For most people, that’d be pretty devastating. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I took the, yeah, the next, the year, a year and a half later, I took the first championship in boxing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, you know I started focusing on how to improve 1 percent daily and that’s when I think consistency and, you know, persistence and I would say discipline comes together and creates something impossible that you might not even think about at some point. And that became in everything I do.
You know, what’s 1 percent better today? What can we do 1 percent better today? And most of the VCs, when they invested in our company, when they started, Meeting us the first meeting the first meeting was like there was a month difference between their first meeting and the month They would always come back and say What the fuck happened to the product and I would say, yeah, we improved about 1 percent daily So by the time they invest the product looks completely different much better.
So I think we do that everything, you know, I did that in everything And I think it was because that switch. Yeah happened in my brain. Yeah, which I’m grateful for Yeah, it’s amazing. And so, so you now go into e commerce and maybe you didn’t even know, I don’t know if it was called e commerce back then, you were just buying stuff and selling stuff, right?
Like, you’re winning and selling stuff. What was that like, figuring out those problems? Because, you know, that’s a theme of figuring out problems. Yeah, I, it’s really like the Rolex example, you know, someone wants something, some other person does not want it. So, it was about bridging that gap when I was there.
I was younger, because I couldn’t buy. So I would go for someone who was throwing away his bicycle and going to another kid who wants a bicycle. And then, you know, sell it. And then I started doing that online. And then I started doing that with products. And I started seeing people. What year was this, roughly?
2006, I was 13 years old. You’re 13 at this point? I was 13. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was something like Craig’s List, and one of these called The Vizzle. And I sold, actually, my dad’s motorcycle. And yeah, and then he said, I don’t want to sell the motorcycle. I told him, he told me. Did you get a commission?
Yeah. Yeah, I got my first hundred bucks. Your first. Yeah. And, and, and he told me, Who told you that I want to sell the motorcycle? I told him, You told me two days ago that I want to sell it. He’s like, no, I was just giving an example. But I want to sell it. I’m like, what, what the hell? Like, do you want to sell it or not?
The guy’s here. Great. End of. And yeah, he ended up selling it. And yeah. It’s your commission either way, right? Yeah. Like, I get my commission. The guy’s here. You don’t sign this on you. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so it’s really funny. But then I started buying different products, seeing what people need. And there was always this market that was, like, very low priced market that people in rich areas can’t reach and would never go there.
It’s a really bad area, but they have really good products. I used to always go to these areas and try to bridge the gap. For, you know, people who buy online could see them. In early days in the Middle East, almost, if you search, almost everything was not available on the internet. So just me making it available as a link, as an SEO, was an opportunity, you know, that I had to leverage.
And so you had other ventures like I’ll pick one other one and then we’ll go into Sully, of course, but, but the, the auto tech side of things, like to have that type of market share, like how’d you come up with that idea and where’d that come from? The idea came from that my sister was pregnant and she was trying to fix her car and she couldn’t and it was like impossible.
I was seeing a vehicle theme here. We got a motorcycle. We got another. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And yeah. She couldn’t fix her car, and if I wasn’t there in the country, then my dad is busy, then she can’t fix her car. So yeah, I found that marketplace very helpful. I got the parts on the platform as a marketplace, like Amazon.
And then I got the suppliers to fix the parts. So instead of just shipping you the part, I ship you the guy and fix it at your doorstep. And we did we grew to over a million users. And, and a year and a half. And yeah. And I think we did about four, five hundred thousand dollars the first year, four and a half million the second year, and then about ten million the last year.
Yeah. So now you’re, you’re, you’re latest venture, Sully. ai. So you’re obviously a seasoned entrepreneur at this point. You already had some, you know, great successes. And now you transitioned to, to healthcare longevity. Like, where, where did that come from? I think it was kind of serendipity. My mom, I grew up actually seeing my mom struggling with healthcare.
She had and I never touched healthcare because I’m not a doctor. So I would always think of ideas, but I would say, I’m not into medicine. So I cannot do something there. And I grew up seeing my mom, she had one bad leg with like, A mix in vaccines and misdiagnosis and medical errors. And then she went, she kept going to the doctors.
And then, until she had two bad nicks, you know. So it was getting worse. And I felt like there’s something wrong with the entire, with the entire industry, not just in the U. S., I think globally. There’s so much data that doctors just sit and look at you. And there’s 10, 000 data points that they need to look at.
Every single time, 20 times a day, so there’s no way they could do that. And they’re also human, so you can’t really, you can’t really expect them to go through all the data, you know, for each and every human being they, they see this day. So, I saw that gap and I thought, what if we run, like I know how to build models, AI models, maybe 5 years ago with BERT, before transformers come out.
But, I was thinking about what if we can do that. Give all this data to the doctor as they talk to the patient in real time. And we actually started the first, we became the first company to do it in real time. Problem was, language models or AI models are slow. Whenever you send them something, they take 30 seconds to come back, 40 seconds to come back.
So we had to use language models, but run them and host them differently. That they would chunk the audio with 7 seconds, send it back. And then come back with the diagnosis and then improve the diagnosis as the conversation keeps going. And then until the system is certain, it can populate the diagnosis for the doctors or anything they’re missing.
Like if I’m talking to you as a patient and you have a reaction to penicillin and I told you, yeah, I’m going to prescribe some penicillin for you within 20 seconds it would populate and say, Hey, you can. And even if he tried to put it on your chart and the EHR or the electronic medical record. It won’t go through until he overwrites it, basically.
So, and then we started automating all the administrative workflows for them, basically improving the care. I think if something like that existed, when my mom was getting her treatments, she could have been better. But we’re human, and I think a lot of people look at doctors as, you know, they hate doctors, or they have a bad experience with the doctor, so they hate the doctor, but it’s a human at the end of the day, right?
So. I resonated with the doctors to see, like, how can we solve the problem. And yeah, we built that, launched it almost 11 months ago. And I was just studying GV, right? I call you GV, right? And I launched that 11 months ago and we’ve been growing almost 90 percent monthly. And yeah, we have 100 healthcare organizations using Sully today.
Yeah, past seven figures in revenue, recurring revenue as well, yeah. Talk a little bit about the team that you assembled for this. I see NASA, Tesla, yeah, yeah, NASA, Tesla, like Google. Like, you put together an insane team to create this. It’s not an accident. Talk a little bit about that. One of the things when I looked at healthcare, in the healthcare space, it was really boring space for a lot of great minds in the Bay Area.
So I live in San Francisco. And when I got there, I started looking at all the health care companies that exist, all the health, health, health care startups. And I started struggling to see that there are no, like, really great people working on the problem because of the regulations, because of the HIPAA enhancements, because of, you know, it’s slow, it’s boring.
And I saw it as an opportunity because AI is also changing the compliance part as well. Like, we’re using a lot of AI tools too. complete our compliances every single day and make sure we’re compliant. So I wanted to put together a very impressive team in one day and I started pitching them the idea that we could be the doctor in the future before the patient sees a doctor.
You know what I mean? So it’s not like we’re replacing doctors, but it’s a big good filter that could give certainty to doctors when they meet you. Or some kind of signals, strong signals. And I started saying we can build a doctor for every human, it’s one human, one doctor. So it was a big mission, very hard to solve.
And you could get the best people in the world if you have something really hard to solve. So we put together a team from my co founder and CTO contributed to over 25 patents of Google, you know, invented the wifi routing. If you guys ever walk in a mall, And you have a blue dot on Google Maps. It’s his invention.
He invented navigation in indoor spaces. And then co invented cellbots. It’s used by Johnson Johnson for surgical robots. So a really smart guy. But he always loved to build. He would, like, we have a big problem in the company now that he’s coding a lot. We need him to stop coding and manage. So it’s a, like he meditates on inputs.
So I don’t know how, but he does. So we have Chetania, our CTO, co founder. Nasheed started two hardware, software companies before as a medical, a chief medical officer. As a really successful primary care physician. So actually one of the things I would say, I was really, like the way I got the team.
So actually I worked for Nasheed for six months. So after building all these companies, I left everything and I went and worked. I worked as a back office admin for six months for a doctor in the Sheep Creek, in the Bay Area. I just worked there, I was checking in patients you know, scribing for the doctor, documenting, doing everything.
Basically just to understand the problem deeply. And, yeah, and then got him as our chief medical officer. He became one of our biggest investors. And then before, like, he raised substantial funds. And, yeah, and then Henry built an AI medical diagnosis company ten years ago. It’s like before a lot of people think about these ideas he’s a doctor too, so he was working in a VC and he was doing hackathons.
He was basically going to hackathons and making 10, 000 every 2 3 days from these hackathons because he doesn’t want to stop coding. So so yeah, and and he was working as a VC, so I’m like, I’m, I’m, no offense to any VC here, but I’m like, Someone like you, you should be building 20, like 20 hours a day, like why are you doing this?
And he started rambling, and I’m like, you know what, fuck it man, just fucking like stop doing VC, just come join us. And yeah, and he jumped on, on board as well, yeah, as a head of engineering. And then yeah, like we have the, one of the recruiters that recruited with Elon at Tesla, the entire co pilot team.
So, there’s a lot of great people, everyone in the team is really excited. I’m the dumbest in the room. Yeah, I would say so. Every single day. So, I have one more question, and then I’m going to open it up for everyone else so that you can also get involved. I’m sure there’s some other questions out there.
So, what was that like, being boots on the ground, like, doing the admin work in the back office, like, to really understand the problems? Like, did anything surprise you? What was that like? It was really painful. Because You know you can solve it, but you don’t want to solve it too early. And you don’t want to, you know, you can code, and I could code, so if you can solve a problem, you usually go into solving mode right away.
But sometimes it’s extremely You have to let it sit. Yeah, sometimes it’s extremely hard to you know, just sit with the problem for a long time and understand deeply what they go through. And I love I’m not a dramatic guy, but I love problems. Like when there is a problem, that means there’s something happening.
If we have something in the company called obstacles, everyone, every, every day, every person in the company feels that stand up for it. If they say no obstacles, then there’s something wrong. They’re not doing something impactful, or they’re not doing something, they’re not shaking something, they’re not trying enough new, new, new things.
So, Yeah, like, I love problems, so, everyone at the clinic used to say, oh, you have a problem, just go to Omar. You know, he likes problems. And it wasn’t about liking problems, but I like when I see it solved. That’s the dopamine that I get. So yeah. And it was hard, but it was, it was like a, a lifetime of experience, because I was, I wasn’t like a, I wasn’t checking in patients, I was watching patients.
How they interact. The network on their phone is not good, they can’t check it on the phone, they need to check it on the, I was watching every single thing, and I built tech products, so I was kind of like doing research 24 7, real, real time research, so it was really important for me, and saw also doctors, different types of doctors, same primary care physicians, same experience, same years of experience, have completely different workflow she doesn’t want to do a certain thing before the patient comes, But this other doctor wants to do three things before the patient comes, so, so it seemed like how can we build a scalable product that could be customized on individual level.
So it made me understand the problem deeply, so I think it was painful, but I loved it. I would go back every single time and actually recruiting the team, I would go online from the clinic and they would say, where are you? I’m like, I’m in, I’m in a clinic. Like what are you doing in the clinic? I’m working there.
Like, aren’t you the founder of the company? I’m like, yeah, I’m the founder of the company, but I’m still working there. So it was, it was, it was good, as a good example, really good example. We have a policy, to be honest, no, we did not still put it as a policy, but it should be a policy starting next month.
Is that each team member should work two days from a customer’s office. That we have, so that we can, we can see what doctors go through. And there’s a lot of things that breaks when you, you launch, you know. So yeah, I think it’s extremely important. I think it was like something if I did not do, it was gonna make the product experience completely different.
Alright, let’s open up for some questions. Come on, there we go. Tiffany. Hey Tiffany, nice to meet you too.
Let me, let me ask you that question again. Let me ask a question. Are you asking the application in the mental health space?
So there’s, yeah, okay, so for, for mental health psychiatrists, we have actually one of the biggest groups in the, in the, in the country. And we, we use certain medical databases before coming up with diagnosis, some FDA approved databases that we use, but until today, the diagnosis part that we give is differential diagnosis.
It’s it’s a, it’s a something that could help doctors. Not miss a diagnosis. But we never, we can never give it certain. We just got FDA clearance because they asked us to remove the percentage that we got out of the diagnosis. Like, this is 70 percent you know, Parkinson’s or something like that.
They, they said, no, no, no. For us to give you FDA clearance you have to remove any percentages. And you have to put, that this is suggested differential diagnosis. So, there’s a lot of work to do there. But, in terms of in terms of things like The conversational like ambient technology. There’s a lot of things that psychiatrists care about more than diagnosis.
For example if someone said he was going on a second date with Amy, right? He would go back and ask them. The doctor wants to see Sully telling him, ask him about Amy. How did the second date go? That actually improves the patient experience by two times. So, doctors, actually psychiatrists, have been coming with those requests more than I need help diagnosing this patient.
For now, I think. But then I think once the AI becomes much better, the models becomes much, much smarter, we could definitely have, be very certain with a certain diagnosis. I think the FDA I was, I was meeting the FDA like, multiple times the past couple weeks, and the FDA is very slow. Like, for them to make a decision, they’re meeting in the quarter 1, 2025, to, for the board meeting to discuss something.
That’s just a discussion. And then for them to meet again, will probably be in, you know, June. So it’s like, they’re very, very slow. For them to approve something, or basically look at something. They, they’re trying, what they’re doing now, they’re trying to understand how transformers work. And the problem is, OpenAI, ILIA, From OpenAI, doesn’t understand how transformers work.
And he’s the one who created OpenAI. So, he doesn’t understand it 100%. And they need a 100 percent explanation for how it works. As sequence by sequence or recurring neural networks. How do they work? Are they, so I think a commissioner, one of the ex commissioners of the FDA actually wrote a big article about this and saying FDA shouldn’t understand how, they should understand where the resources came from.
And if they’re approved or not, that’s it. So, it’s, it’s a long, it’s a long research. What you asked about is a long research. It’s yeah. But we come with differential diagnosis. Suggestive differential diagnosis.
Yeah, it’s a very big, yeah, it’s a very big project.
Oh, that’s awesome. Which part of Dubai? Oh, yeah. Nice. That’s awesome. Yeah, exactly. Burj Dubai just came out in 2006. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Did you buy an apartment in Burj Dubai? No. Okay. Okay, that’s good. Good enough. Yeah. Yeah. How
do you sequence all of that? Yeah. There’s a lot of problems to solve.
Yeah, yeah. I want to give a lot of credit to my co founder, Nasser. So, it was me and him that wanted to do something in the healthcare space. We didn’t know what, no. We didn’t know any, we had no idea. We were trying even a lot of different things. And we played with GPT 2 before 3 and 3. 5 comes out. You know, so we were testing it on medical information.
So we had no idea what we wanted to do. And we didn’t want to hire before we understand the problem, before we actually have a solution for it. Because when you start hiring, you basically are saying that, The problem is valid. Let’s go fix it. So you can’t say that until you kind of be sure that people will pay for it at least at some point or people are going to pull their credit cards or you can find value or monetize it later or people are going to keep using it even if they’re not going to pay right away.
But I think it was a sequence. I think we, it was me and my co founder, we wanted to see what we’re passionate about. Yes, we founded one of the startups together before. So it was the second startup together. So, the marketplace was with my co founder. So we knew that we found each other, and doesn’t matter what we do, gonna be successful.
So we started thinking, what do we enjoy most? And we found that helping, like saving lives, and building tech, and making money, is really, is really like the, the best triangle we could do. And we, Found ourselves, like, really passionate about this problem, even though we’re not doctors. And, yeah, we wanted to solve it.
And from there, like, the sequence was me working at a clinic, CTO joining, CMO joining, Chief Medical Officer joining. Yeah, after I’d been six months, seven months, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then CMO joining, and then the head of engineering joining, and then the sales people joined, you know. It was like, it was sequenced this way.
Really didn’t matter as long as we understood the problem like we everyone like if you talk to anyone in the company today They would tell you They would tell you that the founders understand the problem really deeply
No, maybe not yeah, that’s that’s true. Yeah, maybe not yes
Yes Yes, selling a vision is something very important, but you have to what’s the proof? That you will reach this vision and what are the actions that you’re taking? And if they don’t match, most people will just feel like you’re just saying words, and it’s usually true. Most people just say words.
Alright, one more. Last question. Yeah, we’re trying to make this quick. Congratulations. Why are you in a hurry? Well we’re not trying You’re staying. You’re staying, right? Yeah, you’re staying for the programming. So, we’ll see what’s next. I, I don’t know if you can talk about the self help, so I’m just curious, who are those organizations?
So I’m not saying they’re useless as, as human beings or as people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, like, it’s useless to have this conversation with, with them. So sometimes the CEO is the main decision maker. Sometimes the CMO is the main decision maker. Sometimes the COO is the main decision maker.
Sometimes it’s a doctor in the healthcare organization that’s very influential and has actually curated most of their new tech that they use. So it depends. We try to get the attention of the COO and the chief medical officers, or chief information officer, chief medical information officer, first, and then we try to get their doctors attention.
And then we, they validate it with the doctors, and then they come back and say, hey, yeah, we want to give this to more doctors. And it’s been, it’s been 99 percent successful. So, no, I know you’re guessing. No, I’m not, but I’d love to check. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we made it super easy to use. It’s one of the easiest platforms in the market today. Yeah, it’s one click to do anything the doctor wants. It’s literally one click. And it’s not one click to get the, like, it’s not like six clicks, six clicks to get the entire action done or what they want.
It’s sometimes just one click and that’s it. And they just get everything done. We can record the entire conversation, turn it into a medical note, do the action afterwards, we can automate all these things. So it’s, it’s It’s really helpful. Like we have 99 percent success rate from the pilot to close.
Alright, let’s give it up for Ahmed.
