From a very young age, Max Parmentier knew that he wanted to do work that would in some way contribute positively to society. He volunteered for a non-profit starting at 12 years old, and eventually became a leader and board member at that organization, before carrying on that work with a number of initiatives through high school and university, earning accolades and public funding in the process.
Max’s entrepreneurial roots grew out of this desire to contribute and early experience building grassroots not-for-profit organizations, but they would later evolve into a desire to maximize the utility of his efforts through tech, startups and company building – which is what eventually lead him to found Birdie.
While Birdie’s mission is to help homecare professionals deliver the best possible care with a modern, tech-enabled solution, Max didn’t identify health and homecare as the specific area where he wanted to make a dent in the universe until relatively late in his working life. Nor did he initially set out to found a startup: While he studied engineering and economics in school, he was much more likely to find himself debating and discussing political ideas with friends late into the evening than to spend his nights coding in his basement or garage.
For the first couple of years out of school, Max spent time traveling the world and acting as a consultant for McKinsey on a number of different projects, for a number of different clients. During his last two years at the firm, he became deeply involved specifically in the practice at the consultancy tasked with fighting climate change, which led him to develop a deep expertise on biofuels and the fight against deforestation.
“That element of social contribution was very much there,” Max explained in an interview of this time at McKinsey.
Despite gaining a lot of insight and experience through consulting, it was around this time that Max started to realize he wanted to participate more as an operator, adding value though more direct action rather than acting in a more advisory role. It was also around this time that he began to really zero in on the role technology has as an accelerant and enabler of social contribution.
“Really, as a driver of social progress, technology and innovation is probably the best,” Max said he realized at this point, which led him to join a couple of startups following his time at McKinsey.
“For me, it was the first time I was exposed to an environment where it's very dynamic,” he said. “It's very quick, there's a lot of autonomy, there's a lot of ownership and accountability, and you can see real value being built.”
Despite feeling strong affinity for the startup approach and founder mentality, Max took yet another detour before embarking on his own founder journey: This time, he joined one of the world’s largest global health organizations, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, a Geneva-based international financing organization disbursing upwards of $5 billion per year across efforts to fight the aforementioned diseases in 140 countries worldwide.
As the right-hand of the CFO of that global fund, Max got to experience first-hand what it was like to turn the ship at a massive public organization with extensive multinational reach. It was here, too, that he was inspired to actually build his first tech company, since he witnessed firsthand the problems that come with trying to deploy that kind of capital with maximum efficacy in a wide range of diverse markets.
“Instead of the Global Fund giving millions to Nigeria, and Nigeria would then buy drugs, medicine, bed nets, cars on their own, why don't we centralize and pull that procurement so that we can actually source ourselves, negotiate much better prices, and ensure that the quality is right for these medications?,” Max explained about the concept behind that first startup.
They raised money from various investors, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, hired a team, and scaled it from the ground up, eventually arriving at a platform transacting over $1 billion annually across 80 countries. That organization now continues to operate and generates millions of savings annually when compared to the old way of doing things – all of which gets reinvested into patient care.
“That really feels good,” Max said. “Scaling a technology that really helps people – patients – to be better.”
After a total of four years working on that venture, it was time to tackle a new challenge, one in an area that Max identified as deeply important, both personally and from a broad human perspective.
“I wanted to work in health care, for sure,” he told me. “I knew it was something that was close to my heart. I think it's one of these macro problems that we haven't solved yet at all.”
Like many successful founding stories, Birdie’s stems from personal experience. Unfortunately, in Max’s case, it was the kind of first-hand knowledge hard-won through pain and loss.
“My grandfather was sick, he had Parkinson's around 20 years ago, and he was living with my grandmother,” he said. “My grandmother passed away very suddenly. We didn't expect that, and so we decided to place him in a care home as kind of the default option, and it wasn't a good idea at all. He rapidly deteriorated, and then died.”
Max’s family was obviously hit hard by his grandparents’ passing, but he says he was also “puzzled” by the lack of options that were available to them, and the general lack of available information and education about what to do in that situation. He said he also found puzzling how much society in general struggled with how to cope with aging.
“It's something new to us, to some extent, frankly,” he explained. “For the last 20 or 30 years, we've been facing a rapidly aging population, but we as a society haven't faced that. And on the contrary, I think that society is sending us messages of eternal youth, and we are obliterating entirely the fact that there is a very rapidly aging society that we'll need to deal with.”
Driven by this seeming contradiction between perception and reality, Max and his co-founders at Birdie (Abeed Mohamed and Rajiv Tanna) dug into the numbers and quickly realized that, worryingly, healthcare was, in a word, “bankrupt.”
Max notes that currently, about 60% of health care costs are spent on the elderly population – which itself is growing rapidly. In general, he explained, we have a population that still essentially falls sick (and are subsequently in need of care) at the same age, but that at the same time, they live longer – meaning they need the same or a higher level of care for longer, too. Put simply, health care costs are rising quickly, but GDP is roughly flat in the developed world, so they’ll quickly balloon beyond our capacity to bear.
“When we looked at these numbers, we were like, whoa, this is pretty worrying,” Max said. “So we went on and talked to a lot of business leaders and health secretaries and ministers and the like, asking, ‘What's the plan?’ None of them have a plan – really, none of them have a plan.
While there is work being done in terms of policy papers and debate and discussion around the issue, Max says that there’s really nothing being done when it comes to actually addressing the funding gap that exists between what our system can supply now and what we’ll need later. The fundamental cause of this depressing disconnect is that our current system is based around what Max calls ‘episodic care’ needs.
Doctors, in our current healthcare system, are basically trained with a ‘mechanic’ model in mind, meaning you go to them when you have a problem and they give you a fix. It was an effective system and method in terms of improving over what came before, which was essentially a total absence of organized and methodical science-based care. But in our modern context, Max says that it’s woefully insufficient.
“Today, the vast majority of the people die because of chronic diseases and long-term conditions, and that's essentially the elderly,” he said. “That's diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, dementia, cancer, things you often cannot cure, but that you can live better with – and that requires a totally different approach of care.”
What we require now is a kind of care that is more personalized, preventative, and more holistic. It needs to be somewhat continuous, rather than reactive in times of crisis. So Max and his co-founders decided to look at the segment of the health care system that’s already best-positioned to deliver that kind of care model, even if it isn’t yet outfitted with the right tools and technology: Homecare.
Care delivered in a patient’s home, whether by medical professionals, or by the community that surrounds them, will become “the new primary care,” Max says, and will include everything from very light interventions, to acute clinical care.
While in-home care professionals today are extremely committed, capable individuals, they’re “very poorly equipped” according to Max, often using pen and paper, whiteboard schedules, and extremely outdated technology. Birdie, then, set out to modernize the tooling of the homecare industry from the ground up, including everything from patient assessment, to care planning, to scheduling, payroll, billing and invoicing.
“Our goal is to really make sure that they are doing only one thing, which is caring, and all the rest, all the admin, we take care of, or at least we try to automate as much as possible,” he explained. “But also through the data, and by channeling the data the right way, and using a bit of AI eventually to prevent issues from happening or see signs of deterioration before a human notices it, we can significantly improve the quality of the care, and fundamentally transform the care journey of these patients, and really make sure that we see things much earlier, that we address them, that we prevent stuff – and that they get the best care, at the best time, by the best person.”
Birdie accomplishes its goals by providing all-in-one software that caters to home care businesses of all sizes, providing tools to assist with the management and implementation of a care program, and to also manage the backend. That includes things like staffing; compliance and quality of care tracking; finance, including payroll; the experience of frontline workers themselves before, during and after they conduct care; and weaving analytics and security across all of those functions. In a very concrete way, the company that Max built is transforming the state of the art of homecare, in hopes of helping ensure his own painful personal experience with an aging relative doesn’t have to be repeated.
Basically since he was a child, Max set out to make a significant contribution to how well we live, and through his experience working on social issues at the most globe-spanning scale, he eventually found his way to building Birdie – a startup intent on helping us catch up with, and thrive in, the new realities of health care.
