BACKSTORY: Saul Kornik, CEO of Healthforce and Kena Health

What’s your one top tip for doing a deal?

Always start with the customer, and design a product that solves a problem in the world. In the health-care industry specifically it’s important to realise that there are big incumbents in the market. So if you want to scale and avoid your product being replicated, it’s important to partner with selected incumbents in the early stages of your business.

What was your first job?

My first job in health care was starting a nonprofit that placed doctors from all around the world in underserved public hospitals throughout South Africa.

What is the one thing you wish somebody had told you when you were starting out? 

Find a mentor, someone who has done it all before. 

If you could fix one thing in South Africa, what would it be? 

I would shift the health-care system from a fee-for-service model to a value-based care model. In a fee-for-service model, every player in the system is incentivised to overservice the patient and duplicate services. This results in a higher cost of care, but not necessarily better health outcomes. In a value-based care model, the system is focused on improving health outcomes, while lowering the cost of care.

What’s the worst investment mistake you’ve made? 

Trying to turn a nonprofit into a for-profit.

What’s the best investment you’ve ever made?

Finding the best possible product and UX [user experience] designers and starting with them, even before we had software developers or engineers onboard. 

What’s the best book you’ve read in the past six months and why did you like it? 

The Dao of Capital, by Mark Spitznagel. It’s about Austrian economics, which is inherently a view that the creation of value is what drives economic value, and not fiscal and monetary policy.

If you were President Cyril Ramaphosa, what would you do tomorrow?  

I would set up the regulation and infrastructure required for a low-cost and quality health system for all South Africans. I would leave it to the creativity of the rest of the country to implement the system, based on the framework the regulations provide.