Aman Bhandula
I am Aman. I started Farmako with two of my hacker friends (Kaishu and Nikhil) from college. We do 30-minute medicine delivery in India. We are working on solving healthcare delivery and healthcare intelligence for India for the next 10-20 years.
I studied Geological Technology at IIT Roorkee. I spent four years in college (2016-2020) and had the best time of my life there. I met some amazing people and learned so many things on campus. In my first year, I spent most of my time learning guitar and doing random things with my friends in the hostel. I met friends who were super talented, supportive, and just good to be around. I learned some machine learning, starting with learning Python and basic data science. I literally tried doing everything I liked in college until I finally found what I could do for the next 10-15 years of my life-Farmako.
I truly believe that Farmako is built with the vision of solving the most important healthcare problems, and it will be one of the most important companies for India. We have a team that is super talented, hard-working and believes in the vision.
Some background and early education
I grew up in a small town called Moradabad (near New Delhi). When I was a kid, I loved physics and all forms of art. In school, I used to participate in essay writing and drawing competitions. I have two sisters, one five years and one two years older than me. In retrospect, the school I studied in until eighth grade was not very good. The school was all about memorizing the study notes and just copy-pasting the answers in the exams, but I think my sisters used to teach me ahead of time, which made a huge impact on my education.
Once, someone told my elder sister that she should go to IIT. Back then, we had very little information about the world, and she had just started taking some random coaching locally, which was not at all enough to crack the IIT JEE exam. Usually, in India, people go to Kota, New Delhi, and Hyderabad for a couple of years for coaching. Although she is much more talented and hard-working than me, but she couldn't get into IIT. She always had this feeling I should not suffer like this. So, she always used to teach me ahead of time. When I was in ninth and tenth, I was in a government school, but she made sure that I participated in the Maths and Physics Olympiad. She used to run tuitions for the kids in the neighborhood. She used to teach me and my sister. So she prepared me for the Olympiad, and I got a gold medal in the district. She taught me for the tenth board exams. It was like a military mission that I would have to top the whole district. I don't know why but back then, it was such a big deal. And I actually topped the whole district. It used to be such a stressful and tense situation during the exams, but it was a magical feeling when the results came.
In the eleventh grade, there was this new local coaching for IIT JEE called Scholars Den opened in Moradabad. My family's economic condition was actually very bad, and I had no chance to get the coaching. My sister used to make just enough money as a teenager to put me into coaching for two years, and she spent all of it on that. I think, in terms of education, I enjoyed the coaching the most. It was a very competitive, pressure zone, but the quality of education was very good, I believe. In 2016, I took the IIT JEE entrance exam, and I got a 6930 rank, which was just decent enough to get into an IIT.
My sisters had this bet that they would gift me a guitar if I cracked the JEE exam. And I got one when I went to college (IIT Roorkee). My sister used to write a column in the local newspaper. I started writing, watching her write. Later, I got to work with a lot of great writers and artists in college and in Farmako.
Although, in the early days, the money part was not very good for my family, I don't know how, but everyone in my family never made me feel that I had any restrictions. I always feel that I have a crazy family. Even when I left college in the middle, they supported me which was very counter-intuitive for them given how much they struggled, took an education loan to get me into college, and it was a big deal for friends and relatives. When we started Farmako, they supported me even when we didn't have funding for a long time and no clear path to move forward.
I was somehow lucky that I always had such great people around at the right time.
College days and starting Farmako
We started Farmako as a side project, which later became serious, and now it's one problem we want to solve more than anything else. In the 2018 summer break, I stayed in college for a couple of months to learn machine learning. I used to play Squash in the evening. One day, I injured my shoulder and went to a doctor on the campus. He gave me a painkiller first, but when I told him about another injury I had in my back a few years ago, he suggested I take physiotherapy instead of taking the painkiller. I had a long discussion with him about the medical history of a patient and how it is important in the treatment process. The one thing I understood from this incident and after talking to my uncle, who is a doctor, was that medical history is a super important part of the treatment process. It is just that people don't have their medical records digitized and structured in India, and that's the reason why doctors mostly start the treatment process from scratch with very little context about the patient's medical history.
I was telling this story to everyone, and when I told it to Kaishu and Nikhil one night in the canteen, we all got very excited about it. We were just vaguely discussing all night how great it would be if everyone in India had a unique Health ID, like their Aadhar ID, with all their medical records added. We will apply machine learning to this data and tell people what is good for their health and what is not. After this, we did not start Farmako all of a sudden. Mostly we had on-and-off discussions about this problem for the next 8-9 months. I met with some doctors during this time whenever I got a chance and discussed the problems they face and what is the fundamental reason for not having an EMR (electronic medical records) system in place.
In December 2019, I got an ML internship with one of our college alumni in Bangalore. I was working on Pose Detection and 3D Image Reconstruction. We were building an AI-based personal fitness assistant (ahead of time, but wow). I was living with the founder, who was actually living with the founders of Razorpay. So I got to live with these super talented people. I used to be very quiet and shy during the internship, but I just learned a lot watching them. After a couple of days in Bangalore, I randomly got a call from Kaishu saying he was also coming to Bangalore for his internship and asking if a cab or metro would be the best way to reach Koramangala from the railway station. So basically, he was living 200 meters apart with the co-founder of the startup in a similar setup. And very surprisingly, Nikhil also came there a week later and he was living in the same block as well. The three of us spent a lot of time together, discussing Farmako, different problems, and tech in general. We felt a different exciting energy there. Everyone was building something and solving some problem they believed in.
When we came back to college, I spent the next couple of semesters with Kaishu and Nikhil, seriously discussing the Farmako and the product. I spent so much time with Kaishu researching about and discussing all the problems in healthcare one can think of. Medical records, quick medicine delivery, fast diagnostics, DNA sequencing, AI, vaccines, AR-VR, open source, and whatnot. We were not very clear on what should be the right order to pick one of the problems and start building on it. We thought medical records were the most fundamental building block for personalized healthcare. So we started with medical records and built an EMR app for doctors to write digital prescriptions in a faster and easier way.
(to be continued...)
People I like and follow
- I think I love most of the people on our team. I have not seen such great talented individuals anywhere.
- I have always loved Paul Graham because of his essays and how he built YC.
- I always loved Sam Altman, even before Chatgpt happened, when (almost) nobody knew him.
- I got to know about Linus Torvalds in college, and I was super impressed with him.
- I love Elon and how he is working on some of the most difficult problems in his own style.
- I love how Steve Jobs was super passionate about products more than anyone else, and also his own beliefs about it.
- I also loved Mahatma Gandhi since I fundamentally believe we can only move forward with freedom, peace, non-violence, and an inclusive system in the long run.
- I like nature a lot, and most of my philosophy is inspired by it. I think it's the best system in the whole world. You look at a plant, every single thing works the way it is supposed to work, and all of them work in harmony. Teams should also work like that. In harmony.
We have had posters of all of them in our office since 2020, when we started. We also have some posters of art pieces made by our team members in the office. Also, each pharmacy store we open has a wall painting made by our team.
Things I want myself or someone else to work on!
(A few startups and labs are working on these problems, but we are still not there yet! I am very optimistic that a startup with some great people will come up with some breakthroughs and will solve these soon)
- An open-source EMR App for doctors to write digital prescriptions with an AI copilot
- An open-source safety model for healthcare. AI health assistants will be a part of the ecosystem very soon. To use AI in its best possible form, we need these safety models that can tell whether an assistant's response is safe or not. I am working on this right now and will make a version open source for anyone to use and develop on top of it.
- A real-time health diagnosis device. Like a wearable device or a CGM sensor, which is connected to a mobile app and tells you complete real-time data of a full-body checkup
- A solution to air pollution in Gurgaon. I think if this is solved (along with safety in some places), Gurgaon is a good city to live in.
- A solution to traffic in places like New Delhi and Bangalore. I think Google Maps also has a lot of control over traffic. Maybe we can do something there. Maybe better public transport, increasing speed limits, and better road construction can solve it, but just like the traffic, these are very slow solutions.
- A way for people to invest in other people.
Things I like doing for myself
- I like to play Chess. I started playing in 2020 during COVID, watching Samay and Sagar's live streams. I love Magnus Carlsen, Gary Kasparov and Prag
- I like watching and playing Cricket. I like Kohli, Dhoni, Steve Smith, Ricky Ponting, and Bumrah the most. I support India, Australia, and RCB.
- I like reading books and writing essays (in English) and poetry (in Hindi). My favorite book is "Sab kuchh hona bacha rahega" by Vinod Kumar Shukla.
- I like listening to Indian-Pakistani classical music (Coke Studio, Amit Trivedi, Ali Sethi, Rekha Bharadwaj) and progressive rock (Pink Floyd mostly). I listen to the same set of songs again and again. I don't know why!
- I like playing guitar in my free time. I love playing fingerstyle. I am learning to play some new things now.
- I am starting to learn a bit about farming.