Raising $400M for Cera Care

Absolutely, and it's great to be here, Musty — thank you for inviting me yet again. Hopefully I'll provide some fresh content, something your listeners will be keen to hear. And that's flattering, by the way, because an origin story is usually for people from the Avengers or whatever, which I'm not — but it's great to call it that.

My parents are from Sri Lanka, and they moved to the UK, to London, during the Civil War back in the 80s. That was a really tough period. Their house was burnt down, and so they had to come here quite suddenly. A few years later I was born in North London, actually at Northwick Park Hospital, which is not too far from where I subsequently ended up working many years later.

Sadly, when I was quite young — 12 — my father passed away. That was a really difficult experience, but it made me grow. It made me much more resilient. It made me have to step up to support my mother and my sister during that challenging time, and it made me focus on being a bit more serious about work and where I was going, at a relatively young age. Because before that, I was extremely mischievous at school. Very rebellious. People wondered if I'd even end up at university.

My first exposure to healthcare was as a 16-year-old, when I did work experience in a hospital cardiology department. That was amazing — so eye-opening. Seeing patients come in with heart attacks, receive a couple of medications, and then a few days later be up and about and able to go home was incredible. It was something I didn't think was possible, and it was inspiring to see the impact a clinician and a group of people can make on patients at the most critical part of their lives. That was one of the reasons I decided to get into healthcare and eventually become a doctor.

So I studied medicine, both in the UK and in the US. When I was in the US, I focused a lot on healthcare policy and business, because I was studying on the East Coast where there was a huge sense of entrepreneurship. The culture around building companies and innovation — you can feel it in the air. It was completely different to my experience of studying here in the UK. Everyone had some kind of project or company they were building — you could be a nurse, an academic researcher, or a student doing it out of your dorm room. Everyone was building something.

And then I caught the bug. I knew I wanted to build something myself, and I'd love to look at how technology could be transformative. That was in part because back then, around 2011–12, was when businesses that impact us in the real world really took off. Companies like Uber, food delivery businesses, Amazon's rapid delivery — it was amazing to see how technology could revolutionise these sectors. But crucially, sectors that relied on lots of people. Healthcare ultimately has lots of staff, lots of people — two-thirds of all healthcare costs are people costs. So that made me think: technology could revolutionise what we do in healthcare. It's going to take a bit longer, given it's regulated and we deal with people's lives, but it will happen. That was a major inflection point for me.

I then came back to the UK and practised as a doctor. I was fortunate to stumble into an opportunity where I advised the CEO of the NHS on innovation and technology, and built a number of national programmes focusing on that. That gave me a great insight into two things: which technologies can make a big difference in healthcare — because there are so many. There are over 300,000 health and wellness apps on the App Store, and only a fraction get adopted, because only a fraction solve key problems people actually face on the frontline. And second, which business models succeed in healthcare — because if you build a health technology company, you have to have a great product but also a great business model, and not many ventures I see have that combination.

After that I became a senior advisor at Bain, focusing on developing the healthcare practice in the UK and Europe. And then I decided to co-found my own company, Cera, which is what I've focused on ever since. The ambition of Cera is to revolutionise healthcare by taking it into the home using technology — but I can tell you more about that later.

I think boring industries actually make a great opportunity for building large, interesting companies. If you think about Amazon — they started delivering books, not the coolest thing in the universe. Even their biggest profit maker and growth driver has been AWS, which previously wasn't seen as that cool. If you look at ordering a taxi — a mini-cab company is probably not the most interesting thing you'd think about — but ride-sharing, a technology angle on it, has been immensely impactful and scaled across the entire world. So boring or seemingly boring sectors are typically the ones that are most broken, and in turn have the greatest opportunity for improvement using technology.

In terms of how you pick an area, I always thought — and I still believe — you've got to follow the data. Back when I co-founded Cera and we launched in November 2016, telemedicine was all the hype. There were lots of telemedicine companies, and I could see why: it's on a smartphone, and you're getting access to a doctor, sometimes on demand. But when you looked under the surface, it wasn't solving a massive problem. You'll still have the same amount of contact time between a patient and a doctor, so the scalability is pretty similar. And frankly, a lot of GP practices in the UK and elsewhere were already using Skype for video calls, and doctors had been doing phone calls with patients for years. So it wasn't that big a breakthrough, even though there was a lot of hype.

Also, back in 2016, most people using telemedicine tended to be younger, healthier, sometimes millennials — people who want to track their health conditions. Which is fine, but these are not the people who use healthcare the most. The people who use healthcare the most have multiple health conditions and multiple vulnerabilities, and tend to be older, and are less likely to use a smartphone and engage with telemedicine. So if you go one level deeper into the data, a lot of the patients using telemedicine companies wouldn't come back and use them day in, day out. They'd use them here and there. And that meant the underlying financials were harder to make work — you've got to spend a lot to market and attract customers, and if you're not getting multiple engagements afterwards, the profit you make from those consultations is limited. In some instances you're spending more to get the customer than you get back, which is unprofitable. So I looked at telemedicine and thought: the fundamentals aren't aligned with what I'd be looking for.

I knew healthcare would go from hospital to home. That was a strong theme I was seeing in other countries, it made a lot of sense, and it was happening in other sectors too. And I knew the people who use healthcare the most are older, with multiple conditions. So I thought: what type of business could focus on those areas, be much more sustainable, make a big impact, use technology, and be a great business at the same time?

Looking at the data even more, it was social care and care in the home that I found had the greatest scope for impact — while a bit boring, some might say — because it was even more analogue than other parts of healthcare. People were using pen and paper. In some instances they were storing paper records in bin bags because they didn't even have filing cabinets. It's so old-school. Some GP practices using Skype for teleconsultations seems quite forward-thinking by comparison. So social care was so backwards technologically, very fragmented, full of thousands and thousands of small businesses. And clearly it's going to grow, because people need more and more care — and it gives a good inroad for providing other services. If you can win these people over as customers, you can then look after them in other ways: telemedicine appointments, nurses, medications delivered to their doors.

So looking at the fundamentals and following the data is what ultimately led me to Cera. There is some luck involved too, as you touched on, because timing is important. You may see the fundamentals and say this is really going to work — but the question is when. When is the technology going to be adopted? When is the business really going to take off? Sometimes in healthcare people have been a bit early. They got the model right, it was just too early for customers, or too early for the NHS or insurance companies, and as a result they didn't see the scale they wanted. So you've got to follow the data, but timing matters too.

We knew we wanted to focus on care in the home and use technology to make it better — get the right care in the right place, give carers an app so they have all the information at their fingertips. We launched in November 2016, initially just recruiting some carers, sending them to people's homes, with our basic app.

The biggest challenge wasn't where technology could be used — I thought that was pretty clear, given how backwards the industry was. It was the scaling journey that was harder to crack. This is common in almost all healthcare businesses, because healthcare is not a product where you see an ad on the Tube and think, yeah, I'll try that this weekend. You don't see a YouTube ad and click, sure, I'll order that to my home. People make careful decisions over a period of time. These are life-changing, sometimes very expensive decisions. All of that means the sales cycle is much slower, and you've got to crack growth differently.

Initially we focused on a lot of direct consumer marketing — marketing on the Tube, all the things I mentioned that probably don't work — and we found out the hard way that it was very challenging. It was really expensive to get customers and to generate enough revenue from the people receiving our services, so the whole thing didn't work as a business model.

So we pivoted — and this was a key decision — to partnering with hospitals, the NHS and local authorities, to solve problems they had around care in the home, so that Cera could scale. That was partly because, looking at the data again, it was clear there are around four and a half thousand people every day waiting in hospitals to be discharged home. I thought: we look after people in their home with carers and technology, so we can probably get them out of hospital really fast, because we can get the right carer to that person's door to receive them. So we started knocking on doors — different NHS hospitals, commissioners, contacts we could find — and eventually got our first partnership, where we'd receive referrals from an NHS trust to support patients being discharged from hospital to home.

It could be someone who'd just had a hip replacement, or something much more significant like a stroke, who needs to go home and receive services and support there. And that was a much more powerful business model for us, because we'd get lots of referrals — the demand for getting people out of hospital and into the home is really high, and hospitals need to do it to create capacity and flow, to have space to get more patients in from A&E. If you walk on many hospital wards in the UK, unfortunately you'll see a number of older people who don't need to be there — they're waiting for care in the community that hasn't started quickly enough.

So we got a lot of referrals and started looking after people, and this was a much more sustainable growth engine for Cera. With those partnerships we're not paying per customer, we're not investing a lot in marketing, and they tend to last several years — so we get referrals for years, we build a relationship and a track record. That's a scalable business. It also means that rather than having to focus on demand and customer acquisition, which is the challenge in most businesses as they grow, we just focus on supply — ensuring we have the right number of carers and staff, and that our technology is working really well. That was a major decision that allowed us to scale much more effectively.

Another decision along the journey was to go from a pure technology company — which is what we originally thought we might be, an online marketplace connecting carers and nurses to patients and families, where we just connect and don't manage the service — to a technology-enabled service, where we recruit the carers and nurses, manage them, are regulated by the CQC, and are accountable for those services. We made that pivot because being a pure-play technology marketplace didn't let us control the customer experience and quality of service. It also didn't let us partner with the NHS and local government for the referrals I talked about — because to do that, you have to be regulated. They'll only deal with a regulated player.

And there's another element that became really important for Cera: if you're a regulated, technology-enabled service, you need to collect data on how your patients are doing — track their symptoms and how their health changes over time. That would prove very important for a later part of our journey: using data to predict if people are going to become unwell, to intervene earlier and keep them at home rather than have them go to hospital avoidably. So that decision, from online marketplace to regulated technology-enabled service, was a major one — but ultimately the right one.

The other things I've had to learn a lot about are how you set up good processes, scale a business, focus a product team — how you make sure you're not going too broadly, exploring lots of opportunities in parallel: which partnerships to pursue, which parts of the country to grow in, which ways to grow the product. Going from too broad to much more focused has been a real learning for me.

And then people-related decisions, which I know you want to go into. In essence, as a doctor you never get taught how to manage and build a team. You don't get taught how to recruit and hire really well, or to empower the staff around you to become stronger leaders and drive cultural improvement. It's just not what we're taught at medical school, or on hospital wards or in GP practices. But it's so important when you're building a company, because ultimately the company is about the people — even a pure-play technology company is about the engineers, the product managers, the user experience, how everyone comes together. Those were skills I had to develop on the fly as Cera grew, and I had to scale with the company, which — given we expanded very quickly, particularly over the past few years — has been challenging. But that's where I've had to develop, and where I've learned and made mistakes and hopefully improved my decision-making.

Just to tell you where we are now: Cera delivers healthcare in people's homes across the UK and Germany. We deliver 50,000 patient appointments a day, so we're the largest digital-first home healthcare company in Europe, and we've grown very fast — around a hundredfold in the past three years. We have over a thousand full-time employees who aren't frontline, focusing on technology, operations, brand, finance and elsewhere, and we're continuing to scale across the UK and internationally. We've gone from just delivering care in the home with carers to other services too — nurses, doctors, medication delivery — so we really are a holistic home healthcare partner and provider nationwide.

Great question. Firstly, the UK market for what we do is very large — in the tens of billions of pounds. To put that in perspective, take the food delivery market: for all of Europe it's 30 billion pounds in size — that's for Deliveroo, Uber Eats, Just Eat, Delivery Hero and so on. We have a larger market than that just in the UK. That's why we want to focus on doing a great job of the UK and scaling Cera. Even now we only have a few percent market share of home care and home healthcare, despite being pretty large. That high ceiling for growth means there's just so much more to do — and the more we focus on the UK, the better we become: the higher the quality of service, the more data we have to drive better algorithms, the more partnerships we have with the NHS, local authorities and others. There's a virtuous circle that reinforces the strength of the Cera model.

We expanded to Germany because we wanted to internationalise, to prove we could do it. The German market is actually larger than the UK, and because the German population is a bit older, the need for elderly care and home healthcare is greater. That business has scaled very fast — it's already profitable. We launched about a year and a half ago and it's continuing to grow. Between the UK and Germany we already have a massive market to focus on.

The US is of interest, definitely, but it's a longer-term ambition. The other point I'd make is that saying "there is a US health system" is a bit like saying "there is a Western European health system" — each state operates in a slightly different way in terms of how they reimburse healthcare, their priorities, the models they use. So with the US you've got to be willing to either embrace a state-by-state model, or, if you want to tackle the whole country, bring a significant amount of capital and risk appetite. Because we've got a lot more room to grow in the UK and Germany, we think the UK is a massive opportunity, but it'll still be there later on. It's definitely too large for one player to take, so even if there were competition we'd be fine with that. Plus we'd need to make a very significant investment and take a risk, because we haven't proven our model there the way we have in the UK and Germany — where it's much more just replicating what we know works.

Initially it's definitely a challenge and a moat to overcome. It's much more complex than if we built a dating app, because we've got regulatory compliance, recruiting, vetting, training and looking after staff, branding, marketing, winning partnerships and servicing them — and then all the technology, product, data and engineering. There are so many facets.

I think the toughest sectors to crack — which in turn are sometimes the largest market opportunities — are more complex like this. An example would be what Tesla have done, building electric vehicles and then trying to build autonomous ones. That's really tough — it's regulated, you've got people of all ages and backgrounds driving your vehicles, infrastructure and government challenges. But the pie is massive. It's more complex, but as a result it's been left alone and hasn't been innovated properly, and that creates a massive opportunity to build something truly transformational.

Even then — you mentioned books and Amazon's delivery and Prime service. That still involves a lot of people. Amazon is a massive employer: the people in the warehouses, the people who handle the logistics to ensure a product is allocated and deployed very quickly. That business requires excellent operations, processes and people management combined with brilliant technology.

I'd also say that over the past 10 years there's been a greater movement towards regulated sectors and sectors that involve large numbers of staff — ride-sharing and food delivery are examples. You'd say they're potentially less clean, but these are areas that are massive, outdated, need change, and present tremendous opportunities. And in healthcare, two-thirds of all spend is on people. If you want to stay away from people, or you don't want to be regulated — which means you can't even provide a proper service — then there isn't that large a pie to go after, and I'd query whether you're making a truly impactful difference. You've got to transform both the people side of healthcare and the platform or technology side to have a differentiated model that a health system, insurance company or government can lean on and rely on. They can't just rely on technology. Whereas if you provide both the technology and the people, they can rely on you to deliver, take care of it, give them peace of mind and make a big impact.

Yeah, a ton. A lot of the inspiration for what we do next at Cera has come from other sectors — technologies they're trialling, ways they've improved the product and user experience. I've made a lot of references to food delivery and ride-sharing, and that's because they have large numbers of staff they coordinate through an app, they have to provide a great experience, and there's a lot of logistics underpinning it to get the right person or product in the right place at the right time. Some of that has homologies with Cera and what we do — getting the right healthcare professional in the right place at the right time. Learning from them means we can accelerate our journey and our impact; we don't need to reinvent the wheel. Of course, we're dealing with people's lives in a regulated sector, so we can't just lift and shift — it is more complex.

I'll also look at what's happening with fintech quite frequently, because it's a regulated, complex industry with large legacy players, some of whom are pretty backwards in how they operate. There are lots of stakeholders and a lot of governance to work through. But there's so much to learn from how fintech companies have progressed — in the UK, Starling, Monzo, Revolut, the different journeys they've taken to grow, scale, win more customers and build a product people love. Yes, healthcare may be behind the times, but the advantage of that is we get to see all the mistakes everyone else has made, and try to avoid falling into those pitfalls ourselves.

Definitely. I'll give you a few examples. Ride-sharing and food delivery companies are very visible, so we were almost excessively proactive in ensuring we had a great relationship with our regulator — we dotted the i's and crossed the t's, we were very proficient on regulatory compliance. We also had an almost excessive approach to looking after our staff, training them, making them feel rewarded. We looked at the challenges they went through — the anti-lessons, as you put it — and made sure we almost over-prioritised those areas to get them right.

That's why, when carers start using our app, eNPS improves 95 points — because we've intentionally built the app so they love using it. It's intuitive, it's easy, it addresses their day-to-day issues. Our technology means they spend more time caring and less time travelling, so their job gets better and they enjoy it more, and they get access to online training so they feel invested in, rather than just being people who go from A to B. These are all things we've intentionally focused on, having learned from other sectors, so we can have a much stronger and more effective model.

And our operations are profitable. We've been very keen and astute about ensuring that happens — even last year the profitability of our operations quadrupled. That was a particular focus, because of the learnings not just from other sectors like food delivery and ride-sharing, but even from companies in healthcare and health tech who burn a lot of money and don't always have a clear path to profitability. That creates risk for the business, the patients and the staff. We don't want to be in that position.

So from the very early days of Cera — which comes back to looking at the data and the fundamentals — I wanted a model that had really impactful, disruptive technology but a business model to match. Focusing on care in the home worked for us because our carers typically visit a person three times a day, every day, for years. Imagine if you had three Ubers a day, every day, for years — the economics would look very different. So I intentionally focused on a part of healthcare that's very sticky, very recurring, where you build a strong relationship with the customer and provide a great experience — and the financials work out way better. That meant very early on our operations became profitable, and they've been profitable for a few years now. That was an intentional strategy, having seen the difficult experiences other businesses have gone through — and given the stock markets over the past year, that's been compounded for companies that are unprofitable or burning a lot of money.

I love making an impact. Throughout my career — practising as a doctor, working in policy, consulting, being an academic — I've always focused on using healthcare to make a difference, and that's been a big driver. It's a virtuous cycle for me: the bigger the impact I make, the more I want to do it. That's kept me motivated. I'm not doing what I do just to earn more or personally gain a significant amount — that ultimately isn't particularly fulfilling, and you'll run out of drive quite quickly. But because I really want to revolutionise healthcare and make a massive difference, whether through Cera or the other ways I'm trying to contribute, that keeps my drive more sustainable.

Complacency isn't something I've really faced, because there are always different stresses, issues and challenges. As the company grows really fast, I'm always being stretched in different ways, so there's not much room to be complacent — I'm always pushed outside my comfort zone. It's more about moderating that so I'm not overstretched, that I'm having a good work-life balance and making time for my family and my wife, so my drive in the company isn't to the detriment of those parts of my life. That's a continuous work in progress.

If you want a multi-year journey of building a business over years and decades, or really revolutionising a sector — and pretty much every sector is tough to change — it takes a lot of persistence, resilience, going against the grain, being a pioneer. That's a marathon, not a sprint. So to your point about being an Olympic athlete: you've got to pace yourself properly. If you push too hard, the risk of burnout and a lack of motivation can really backfire. Ensuring you've got the right processes and mechanisms so you can be more balanced and sustainable, and run the whole marathon, is important.

There are certain parts where you have to run a bit faster — there's a really important opportunity you're pursuing, or a target you're aspiring to, or a funding round that needs to be closed. That requires you to push harder as a leader. But overall you need to be sustainable, because it's a marathon, not a sprint. And in sectors like healthcare it takes time — healthcare businesses take significantly longer to scale than other sectors — so you have to adapt your journey individually, rather than burning out and having an unsustainable sprint that ultimately leads you backwards.

That's a great question, and what I'd say is: people are different. If you look at people who work in a charity, I don't think they're in it to make a ton of money — they'd have chosen a different profession — and I don't think they're necessarily in it for fame. In the same way, people who want to be carers, nurses, doctors — becoming a doctor doesn't have the same prestige. They're not choosing it for the money or the fame; they're doing it because they want to make a big difference.

I originally came into healthcare to be a doctor, to look after patients and work in the NHS. My route has been a bit different, or serendipitous, to land me at Cera. But I want to make an impact, and that's my main driver — it's less about some of the other things we've talked about. What I would say, though, is I'm very driven about the scale of that impact. I'm not shy about saying I want Cera to have a tremendous impact on the way healthcare is delivered — such that when you look back at what healthcare in the home, and healthcare at large, looked like before Cera and after, I want there to be a permanent, significant, visible difference. I believe that's necessary, and it's also what I want to do — it's part of my career aspiration, part of what motivates me: that impact at scale. So if you had to call BS, I'd push back on that quote and say some people are different, and you can see that based on the jobs they end up doing.

The people I know who are running businesses that are scaling fast — like Revolut, in fintech, or large e-commerce companies that have grown massively — growth is challenging, stressful, and has growing pains. All of them are thinking: wow, the business is a multiple bigger than it was a year or two ago, this is a new set of challenges, a new phase for me as a leader, I have to adapt. And that adaptation, being outside your comfort zone, is stretching, not easy, hard.

I think being a founder is one of the hardest things you can do, compared to any of the roles I've had. Building a company from scratch, against the grain, growing quickly in a regulated market — that's tough. So when I see them, it's more sharing war stories and battle scars than "I'm so fulfilled, this is amazing." You can be happy about the results and the impact, but make no mistake: being a founder and building a company that scales fast is challenging, and it continuously pushes you. But ultimately you grow as a person in a way you never would have otherwise, and you make a difference that's hard to have in almost any other role. It is fulfilling — it's just that the challenges alongside it sometimes distract you from that fulfilment.

Are you talking about when we received significant investment into the company, or —

There's a lot more responsibility, is what I'd firstly say. Through Cera, I'm looking after many employees' wellbeing and many, many patients every single day in this country and others — that's a significant responsibility. Before Cera, I don't think I'd ever lost a night of sleep. I slept so well. Even as a junior doctor it was never an issue — I used to wonder why people complain about sleep. Then I set up a company, and that changed.

So building something that scales and becomes larger — yes, you're making an impact, and there's a bit of prestige to it — but there's a lot more responsibility, a lot more weight, a lot more challenge. And actually, the bigger the company becomes and the stronger your leadership team, the more the problems that land on your desk are the really difficult ones. If you've got a brilliant CFO, CTO or head of operations, they handle most of the issues — so the items they can't handle are really tough or tricky. Ultimately, as a CEO, that's the stuff you've got to navigate, and if it's something new, you have to learn fast and deal with it, and the repercussions of not making the right decision are far more severe. So judgement — developing judgement, and making sure you've got the right data and tools to make the right decisions — becomes paramount.

That's a heavier weight to carry. For me, I enjoy leadership, and I get enjoyment from that, but the responsibility and challenge scale with the company, with the influence you can have, with the funds you've raised, the staff and the resources. So it's not all plain sailing — definitely not. And there's that phrase, more money, more problems. I won't go into my rap and hip hop interests, but more money, more problems — sometimes that's the case.

Firstly, I tend to be less bothered about the hot trends people are discussing — in the same way that when we co-founded Cera, telemedicine was the hot trend, but I'm much more interested in the fundamentals and what the data and facts suggest.

When it comes to leadership, there's a balance between being vulnerable and presenting a strong front, and it depends. You need to develop a toolkit of different styles as a leader and apply the relevant one to the situation — it's not one size fits all. There are instances where being vulnerable is important: if you're trying to build trust with a colleague, or they're going through a tough time, it helps them to know you're feeling that too. People want to see that authenticity — the genuine you.

But at the same time, if there's a short-term crisis that requires people to be mobilised and deployed in a specific way, or you've got to come up with a plan and get it done — that requires strength, conviction and clarity. When the pandemic started, at Cera we didn't even know if our carers were going to be classed as essential workers. So we didn't know whether, when the country went into lockdown, we'd even continue delivering a service. At that point I had to think about the alternative models for the business if we couldn't keep delivering care — because that's how we make money — what's the plan B, plan C? That requires strength, conviction and clarity, to you and to your core team. I wouldn't say that's the right time to go down the deep vulnerability route.

There was also an opportunity there, because a number of people had lost their jobs, for us to provide them with jobs in care by retraining them using technology. So we launched a massive jobs programme a few days later — recruiting and training 10,000 people from other sectors who'd lost their jobs to work in care, to help alleviate the pressures in the pandemic. We made a massive difference to people who needed jobs and to people who needed care, and took pressure off the NHS during that critical time. But that required strength and conviction. So there are different tools in the toolkit, different styles a leader needs depending on the situation. And in a startup, where the business is changing quarter by quarter — a different size and scale each quarter, especially in the early days — that adaptability, being dynamic, is crucial.

When it comes to what people out there think about leadership, authenticity and vulnerability — I recently saw a film called Air) in the cinema, about how Nike signed Michael Jordan to get the Air Jordan brand off the ground. Jordan received a lifetime, hall-of-fame award from the NBA over ten years ago, and he cried when he received it. He gave a really authentic speech about how his mother and all these people supported him through his life. And people made fun of it — because they saw this person, an icon, super competitive, who always wants to win, now being really emotional and vulnerable. Our society made fun of it, which runs contrary to what you were just talking about. That's why I don't tend to go with the hot topic; I try to look at the fundamentals and why being a certain way is helpful for me and the organisation.

Let's clear a few things up. Yes, I wish people a happy new year — I wouldn't do much more than that, in terms of giving them a life update about my personal trials and tribulations. But I think it's nice to build relationships and to have different checkpoints for doing that over time. Do I still wish people a happy new year? Yes — people close to me, friends, family, some work colleagues.

It's much more about depth than breadth. In building Cera, trying to become a leader and manage large numbers of teams and staff and look after them, deep relationships, connections and bonds — people you can trust, who you can go to during times of challenge, who you can get advice and mentorship from, who you can speak very plainly with in a safe, comfortable way — that's super important. And it takes time, it takes investment; you get as much as you give. That's what I'd advocate for. I'm much more a fan of deep collaborations, connections and relationships than knowing thousands and thousands of people I interact with once a year.

I need to be specific about the advice I'm giving! That's not what I necessarily advocated — but yeah.