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Virgílio (“V”) Bento
Founder and CEO of Sword // Pioneering how we treat patients with AI and freeing 2 billion people from pain in the process.
Virgílio ("V") Bento is primarily known as the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of SWORD Health, a company he established in May 2015.1 SWORD Health aims to revolutionize pain management through AI-driven solutions, with the mission of "freeing the world from pain".12
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Bento's vision is to make world-class care accessible to everyone by leveraging AI to transform healthcare access and delivery.2 His leadership has positioned SWORD Health as a leader in the digital health space, focusing on innovative solutions to improve patient engagement and care delivery.2
Highlights
Looking for a Senior Talent Recruiter to partner with me directly and work together to make Sword the startup with the highest talent density across all our verticals. DM me directly.
Short Sword story on how incentives drive behavior and how we've leveraged this principle to fix the biggest crux in healthcare: patient engagement.
Before we entered the market, I used to have conversations with other founders in Healthtech/Digital Health to better understand the challenges they were facing. (Feedback is truly a gift.) I asked all of them what one thing they would immediately make better if they had a magic wand. The overwhelming response was engagement, specifically, the ability for patients to adhere to their care programs.
This insight was eye-opening, but not entirely surprising. It was vastly known by then, and still true today, that the great majority of new healthcare solutions directed at members fail not because they're not clinically efficient, but instead because it's very challenging for members to engage with them long enough to see real and lasting benefits.
As we delved deeper into this challenge, a piece of wisdom from Charlie Munger came to mind: "The only thing I want to know is where I'm going to die so I never go there." And we knew that lack of engagement in the Sword program would be how we would die, either now or in 5 years. If no one really adheres to our program, members don't recover and clients don't see the ROI they're expecting. We're dead.
This realization led us to a crucial question: How do we ensure that everyone at Sword is maniacally focused on engagement and on innovating to excel at it?
The answer lay in aligning our incentives with patient success. We designed our pricing model to ensure our revenue would be directly tied to member engagement. Under this system, we would only receive payment as members progressed through the program and completed their sessions. At the time, the industry standard among our competitors and other digital health solutions was to collect 100% payment upfront, before members even began the care program.
This decision entailed significant short-term trade-offs. During 2020 and 2021, our revenue was approximately half of what it could have been had we followed our competitors' practice. However, our strategy proved immensely beneficial in the long run. We developed exceptional expertise in driving engagement, which ultimately enabled us to become the fastest-growing solution in our vertical.
Our innovative approach didn't go unnoticed. Our innovative pricing model proved so compelling to clients that they began requesting their other digital health providers to adopt what became known as the "Sword pricing model," which is now increasingly becoming a new industry standard.
In conclusion, this experience has reinforced a valuable lesson for us: When making decisions, it's always very tempting to go for the ones that lead to a maximization of revenue. But by definition, building a generational company isn't a sprint. It's a marathon. And easy choices now lead to a harder life in the future. And that future comes fast.
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Mesh is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Mesh offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Mesh's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Mesh has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Mesh is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Mesh beneficial.
Mesh offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Mesh offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Mesh's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Mesh offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Mesh focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Mesh also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Mesh offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
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