Rapid Response: How Cost Plus Drugs is revolutionizing pharma, with CEO Alex Oshmyansky

Masters of Scale

WaitWhat

Entrepreneurship, Business, Management, Reid Hoffman, Mindset, Diversity & Inclusion, Jeff Berman, Bob Safian, Startups

4.6 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 3 December 2024

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

With the help of co-founder Mark Cuban, Cost Plus Drugs CEO Alex Oshmyansky is radically re-engineering the pharma marketplace and dramatically cutting the price for many prescription drugs. Oshmyansky joins Rapid Response host Bob Safian to share his amazing journey — from struggling as an immigrant in primary school to starting college at age 13, how medical practice led to entrepreneurship, plus reimagining his original plan on advice from the legendary incubator Y Combinator. Oshmyansky explains how Cost Plus Drugs stumbled into success, turning adversaries into allies and harnessing patience as a superpower.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, listeners, with technology moving so quickly, it can feel impossible to keep up,
0:05.7	especially because few podcasts truly give you a dose of the future.
0:10.4	The A16Z podcast is the exception.
0:13.9	The chart-topping show brings on movers with a track record of being both early and right,
0:18.3	like Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak or or Cost Plus Drugs Maverick, Mark Cuban,
0:23.3	or A16Z co-founders, Mark Andresen, and Ben Horowitz. Not to mention folks, you don't typically
0:29.0	get to hear from, like the very first the CTO of the CIA or the CISOs behind OpenAI, Anthropic,
0:35.7	and DeepMind. From the science and supply of GLP-1s to 3D printed rockets to the self-driving cars on our roads now,
0:43.8	go ahead and eavesdrop on the future with the A16Z podcast.
0:48.3	One of our initial big challenges was just getting the pharmaceutical companies to work with us
0:52.8	because the big cartel basically says,
0:55.0	don't do business with cost plus drugs,
0:56.7	or we won't buy your product anymore.
0:58.4	They're not supposed to.
0:59.1	It's grossly anti-competitive, but everyone tells us they do.
1:02.1	I saw Mark Cuban had a public Gmail, and I was like,
1:05.2	eh, can't hurt.
1:06.1	I shot him a line, and surprise, surprise, Mark is manic.
1:09.0	He's incredible on email. But yeah, he got back in like
1:12.1	five minutes and we had a brief dialogue and he invested a small amount of money to start with. Now he's
1:17.2	a true operational co-founder. He wants to, you know, what he says is F up the industry.
1:34.3	That's Alex Oshmiansky, CEO of Cost Plus Drugs, which he co-founded with Mark Cuban.
	...

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