Stories
Stories
The Network Effect
Courtesy Raj Kapoor
Courtesy Raj Kapoor
Each year Lyft’s Chief Strategy Officer Raj Kapoor (MBA 1996) and several of his HBS classmates gather for an informal reunion. After catching up in Aspen in early March, the group dispersed and, one by one, began to experience symptoms of the coronavirus. Kapoor was tested and by the time he received the results nine days later, they confirmed what he already knew: he had COVID-19 (and so did his wife, a physician, and two of his four kids).
Kapoor’s testing experience revealed an ad hoc process with efficacy issues—two of the three kits he ordered didn’t even work—and sent him digging into the larger challenges posed by the pandemic. He soon discovered a gap he knew he could fill: While there was a good deal of clinical research underway, 85 percent of testing, drug, and vaccine trials were delayed because of recruitment for volunteers to participate in clinical trials.
On March 29, 2020, Kapoor and his wife devised a solution: WorldWithoutCOVID.org, a nonprofit public health initiative that connects medical researchers with wiling volunteers. A longtime student of network effect marketplaces, he had seen the powerful impact of critical mass during his career as an entrepreneur, investor, and executive, and he wanted to put it to work on COVID-19 research.
After he posted his early plans Facebook, Kapoor heard from Jennifer Fonstad (MBA 1997) who introduced him to Clara Health, a startup specializing in making that connection for all disease types. Within two weeks the team had published a website, WorldWithoutCOVID.org, using Clara’s software (gratis) to match those conducting clinical trials with people willing to be subjects. Previously, explains Kapoor, “the process for participating in a clinical trial was very convoluted. There is a huge government database that is not consumer friendly.” Kapoor and a team of volunteers created a simple way for those interested in helping advance research to get involved. By early May, the site had registered over 1,000 COVID related trials needing over 858,000 volunteers.
“Every week, every day, every hour we can decrease the time for developing COVID-19 solutions will make a tremendous impact,” says Kapoor, who notes that the platform will soon begin to match COVID positive survivors with blood plasma donation opportunities. With so many people feeling helpless in the wake of the pandemic, Kapoor stresses that medical researchers need a huge volume and a wide variety of volunteers, not just those who have had the virus. “The more who sign up, the quicker we will solve the problem,” he offers. “This is a way for anyone to make a real difference.”
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