When Free Is Not Enough
Hjalmar Nilsonne on why Neko Health stopped selling to clinics and built its own, how a moonshot keeps its people motivated, and the Twitter DM from Daniel Ek that started it
· 7 min read
Hjalmar Nilsonne, co-founder and CEO of Neko Health, interviewed by Alex Konrad (Upstarts Media Podcast)
Hjalmar Nilsonne is the co-founder and CEO of Neko Health, a preventive healthcare company that scans the whole body in under an hour. He dropped out of high school, co-founded two energy startups and later joined Spotify founder Daniel Ek to build Neko, which spent years in stealth before opening its first clinic in Stockholm. Neko has completed 100,000 scans at about 8 clinics in Scandinavia and Europe, and has opened in New York with Miami and Washington, DC planned. A scan costs $499 in the US, and the global waitlist stands at about 300,000.
Summary
Hjalmar Nilsonne says Neko Health pivoted from selling technology to clinics to building its own, after he wrote a memo called "Free is not enough" arguing that clinics have no incentive to adopt better prevention even at zero price. The company now makes its own devices, runs studies, operates clinics and sells directly to consumers, which he calls four or five hard businesses under one roof. Each clinic is cash-flow positive within about 6 months and pays back in about 2 years, and the company reinvests the cash and the data. His view is that consumers who vote with their wallets, as they did for Tesla, are what change the healthcare system. These signals are from an interview that Alex Konrad did with Hjalmar Nilsonne on the Upstarts Media Podcast.
