Exclusive Interview With Billionaire Dr. Jacque Sokolov

“Your network is everything”

Richard C. Wilson: All right, so maybe about a year and a half, two years ago, Jacque came and gave a standalone presentation. I think it was in Beverly Hills and sat on a panel as well. I still remember some of his comments because they were so impactful. He’s the chairman and chief executive officer of SSB, a diversified US-based healthcare development and investment firm. And he’s had multiple billion-dollar-plus exits, including a DecaCorn, a $10 billion-plus company he helped build. He also has one of the largest, longest-running LLCs, I believe it is, with over 1,000 investors in it that’s scaled all the way up to $1 billion-plus. So it’s definitely a founder type to learn from and an investor to learn from, and we appreciate you being here today. What else would you add to your background just so everybody kind of knows where you’re coming from?

Dr. Jacque Sokolov: Richard, first of all, it’s a pleasure to be here. I’m not selling services. I’m not selling a product. I basically am here because I think if I would have had an environment like this 30 years ago when I was starting my family office, it would have helped me significantly. So that’s the reason I’m here. The only thing I know about is healthcare. I’ve spent 30 years in healthcare, but I’ve invested in almost every sector of healthcare. I’m not sure I could start my business again today the same way. In fact, I’m sure I couldn’t, but that’s probably the lesson to learn. At the end of the day, when you’re doing the deals and investments and you’re looking at the environments you’re working in, you really have to understand precisely what the limitations are in terms of that investment in some kind of organized way that we could discuss this morning.

Richard C. Wilson: Great, appreciate you being here then. With all the experience you have in healthcare and life sciences, what areas are you most excited about? You’ve got the three decades-plus of experience, like the last two speakers.

Dr. Jacque Sokolov: Well, this is a fascinating time. Healthcare is always fascinating. First of all, we’re hitting $5 trillion in US healthcare spending for 2025. If you can’t make money with $5 dollars changing hands, then you ought to just take out a gun and shoot yourself. I don’t mean to be overly intense on this, but there’s just no sector that is so big. Someone very, very smart—much smarter than myself—David Jones, who founded Humana, said to me, “Just find one small fire hydrant and stand in front of it.” At the end of the day, right now, we’ve been in kind of a funk in healthcare since COVID. COVID became the US economy for a period of time that no one anticipated. We’ve come out of that to some degree, but at the end of the day, so many of the advances that really looked very promising have not really been invested in for a whole variety of reasons, and we’re now in this political uncertainty environment with RFK potentially in the mix, different kinds of political issues—not necessarily negative. All these different factors, I think, will provide opportunity, but I think there are still challenges in relation to key areas. But I’m still very bullish on physician practice management. I think, again, I’m probably the only person on the planet who has been involved in $3 billion startups with physician practice management and am still sitting here living to tell it. Number two, I think we’re going to continue to see wonderful expansion in relation to mRNA, DNA, and AI-enabled applications. The issue with AI is whether we’re going to come from the top down or from the bottom up, and the point solutions offer significant investment opportunities that we could talk about.

Richard C. Wilson: Great. Since areas of promise, like in the healthcare space, rarely mature, it might be seemingly random from people outside the space, how would you handicap the likelihood of assets appreciating and doing well and what milestones or markers do you look for?

Dr. Jacque Sokolov: Some aspects of healthcare are substantially more cyclical than others. I think the PPM industry is actually one that is almost entirely cyclical in relation to supply and demand. Optum controls the market. $90 billion in physician practice management is really controlled by Optum. So Optum sets the floor in relation to billion-dollar deals in physician practice management. You’re not going to go against that trend. You have other major players like Walgreens and CVS and others that we have investments with that are in the five and ten and twenty-billion-dollar range, but they’re not in the $90 billion range. So what you need to do is look at the trends affecting the industry leaders where there aren’t really dominant industry leaders. In sectors like AI, you have specific examples and opportunities that you can focus on in different ways.

Richard C. Wilson: I know you’re very focused on healthcare. Was it physician practice management that separated you from everyone else at the beginning? Tell us about your focus and how long you had an extreme focus.

Dr. Jacque Sokolov: Richard, I would like to tell you it was because I was so brilliant and able to sort out all these enormous complexities of healthcare. It’s not true. At the end of the day, if you’re not at bat, you’re never going to get a hit. So looking at all the different changes going on within a $5 trillion industry, even when that industry 30 years ago was $500 billion, not $5 trillion, it still gave you an opportunity to look at healthcare adherence, physician practice management, integrated delivery systems, pharmaceuticals, small molecule pharmaceuticals, biologics, genomics, and other areas. We’re now at a critical point where the same formula that we used 30 years ago is still accurate. You look at the clinical model. If the clinical model doesn’t work, you shouldn’t be investing in that healthcare environment. That sounds basic, but literally, that’s where most people start and stop their investment thesis. But it’s just not clinical. It’s clinical, then you have to have a business model that pays for it, and then you have to have an operator that can actually run the company. So the three elements are clinical, business, and operating expertise, and at the end of the day, whoever you’re investing with needs to defend those three areas of expertise.

Richard C. Wilson: What about when people say something’s not possible, and you’re able to do it? Has that happened to you? What helped you achieve the impossible?

Dr. Jacque Sokolov: I think every billion-dollar exit we’ve had in multiple sectors of healthcare, people have said it was never going to happen. But here’s the key—it was the clinical model. And, quite frankly, we miscalculated occasionally. We knew biosimilars were going to be big. We didn’t know how long it was going to take or how much we would need to invest, but $50 million turned into $19 billion. That was a biggie. We lost $50 million on cellular regeneration because we miscalculated the clinical model. But at the end of the day, many of the very big exits we’ve had could not have been predicted. You might have predicted they had a high probability of success, but you could never really predict how big they were going to get.

Richard C. Wilson: In your case, was there a strategic distribution access to get new doctors for physician management or some sort of distribution platform that supercharged everything?

Dr. Jacque Sokolov: It goes back to what you articulated earlier. When you’re doing something that people say you can’t do, you have to be clear again with the filters I just talked about. Will the clinical model for that particular sector work? And it’s usually a subsector, not a whole sector. You need to find a solution for that population you’re looking for because you have enough money going through that population to be successful or not. Find someone who understands that business and then find someone who’s operated that business, because if you haven’t operated that business, you can spend huge amounts of money and not be successful.

Richard C. Wilson: What would you say to people looking at returns of 15, 20, 30 percent to 10 to 20 X returns? What’s your advice to investors and founders trying to allocate their time and investments?

Dr. Jacque Sokolov: At SSB, we make earlier-stage investments, typically seven to eight figures, with 10 to 30x potential. We don’t invest in small percentages; we focus on bigger returns. This approach is in line with the philosophy Richard has articulated, which is why I enjoy these conferences.

Richard C. Wilson: I remember you said about a year and a half ago that when asked how you work with billionaires, you said, “I helped make them billionaires.” You added value first. Can you speak to that or give an example?

Dr. Jacque Sokolov: One of my guiding principles is to pay it forward. I trained as an academic cardiologist and left that to change healthcare. I had to bring people with me. A good example is the Summit physician practice management entity. The Government grew from a $20 million initial capitalization to almost a $9 billion exit. We made 1,800 physicians millionaires in that process. Not billionaires, but millionaires. Some became decimillionaires. Bringing people along with your clinical, financial, and operating model is absolutely critical in professional services.

Richard C. Wilson: What’s an unlikely piece of advice you’ve learned the hard way that you could share with people here?

Dr. Jacque Sokolov: Expand your network to the greatest ability you can, hearing from multiple, different sources. One of the things Richard asked is where we source our deals. The answer is everywhere—National Association of Corporate Directors, universities, boards, and LinkedIn. I have approximately 25,000 people who follow me on LinkedIn. I try to pay it forward, sharing what I’m watching.

Richard C. Wilson: Anything else you’d like to share with the room?

Dr. Jacque Sokolov: The real challenge is in healthcare. Healthcare is so broad, but we’re going to see some foundational issues that will come back in relation to complexity, prior authorization, and certain areas. A term you might not hear other places is Evernorth, owned by Cigna, a prior authorization giant. They’re not popular right now, and I think they’ll get a lot of scrutiny along with the PBMs. I wouldn’t be jumping to buy PBMs or anything with a heavy pre-authorization component right now.

Richard C. Wilson: Thank you for sharing those insights. I’m sure everyone in the audience got a takeaway. We truly appreciate your time and generosity.

Dr. Jacque Sokolov: Thank you!

The following billionaire interview was setup for us through Henry Sauvagnat from Chempap.

Jacque J. Sokolov, M.D. is chairman and chief executive officer of the SSB Companies, a group of diversified healthcare advisory, development, and investment organizations. SSB has four strategic businesses including SSB Solutions, SSB Investment Funds, SSB Financial Services, and SSB Government Contracting.

Some of his projects include redesigning large health plans such as the Humana Inc. turnaround in 2000, and the transition of Hospira from an I.V. solution company to the largest independent biosimilar manufacturer in the world that Pfizer acquired for $17 billion in 2015.

In addition, Dr. Sokolov remains an active investor in the development of physician practice management companies such as the Summit Medical Group/CityMD and its initial $1.65 B transaction by Warburg Pincus in 2019.

1) What was the major turning point, point of increased momentum, or strategic choke point, that once you acquired or completed, made everything you were doing surge forward?

The first major accelerator was becoming a corporate officer of a Fortune 100 company. That allowed me to recreate that company and sell it to a large publicly traded company which I became a major share holder and chairman of the board. From there I invested in multiple billion dollar companies that became $ 100 Billion companies. This happened in inflection point areas such as biosimilars, mRNA, DNA, AI, etc. Areas of extreme growth and profitability.

2) What is the most valuable strategy, worth far more than $1 million, that you wish someone provided you with early on that you can share here?

Your network is everything and what you have done previously in the single biggest predictor of success in the future. People invest in people who have done well because they are likely to do well again.

3) What is the #1 most costly mistake you have made, seen many investors make, or business owners make that could be avoided?

Not knowing when to take your chips off the table. It is extremely difficult to time exits. What I have learned is that you should sell 49% of your investment many times as it grows, so that 49% continues to gain value, and ultimately you will receive more than one sale you think is top market.