My Australia Story: Dr Marcus Tan

Maggie Jiang: Good evening colleagues, guests, friends. I'm Maggie Jiang, Associate Professor at the School of Social Sciences at UWA. It's truly wonderful to have you here with us on this Friday evening in this weather for our next instalment of My Australia Story Public Talk Series. This initiative is a collaborative effort between the School of Social Science at UWA and the WA Museum. And it's really good to have you here enriching the event.

Now before we commence, I'd like to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which we gather today and pay my respects to the elders, past, present and emerging.

The My Australia Story project is to highlight the diverse journeys of individuals who have made Australia their home and achieve notable success in their careers. Our goal is for the stories to bridge cultural divides and inspire people from all backgrounds. Now this evening we reached the fifth instalment of our series, building on the success of our previous sessions.

Now for those who are new to our instalments, let me briefly outline the format. For each session we have the privilege to host a speaker, and to share the career journey and wisdom with us. And we'll reserve 10 minutes for questions and answers, providing an opportunity for you to engage directly with the speaker. And following that, we'll have a networking opportunity for you to continue conversation with the speaker and with the peers if you like.

Now this event owes its success to the continued support and collaboration of UWA and the WA Museum. Now tonight we are grateful to have senior leaders from both UWA and the Museum. We have Mr Alec Coles, the CEO of Western Australian Museum and Professor Amanda Davies, Head of School of Social Science at UWA. Professor Davies will be introducing our distinguished speaker for the evening. Now please join me in welcoming Professor Davies to the stage. [applause]

Professor Amanda Davies: It is my honour tonight to introduce our speaker, Dr Marcus Tan, entrepreneur, company director, doctor and volunteer. Dr Tan is an experienced medical doctor, healthcare and technology entrepreneur and company director with over 25 years clinical and commercial experience. Tan is the recently retired founder, CEO and managing director of Health Engine, which is currently Australia's largest online consumer healthcare platform. Dr Tan worked his way to this incredible success after first achieving his medical degree from the University of Western Australia, and then later an executive MBA from the Australian Graduate School of Management. Dr Tan held senior management positions as a medical director and managing director for a national clinical group and a health management consultancy. And he also chaired and held director roles over 20 years with the divisions of general practice, GP networks and Medicare locals. He was a founding director of WA Primary Health Alliance and previously served on the governing council of the very large South Metropolitan Area Health Service in Perth, and the board council of the Australian Medical Association. As a fellow of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners and the Australian Institute of Company Directors, Dr Tan remains heavily involved in both healthcare spaces and technology and innovation ecosystem in our state and much more broadly, of course. Currently, he serves as venture partner at Purpose Ventures, Entrepreneur-In-Residence at RAC's Better Labs Ventures, Chair of Spacecubed and is an advisory council member of Western Australia's Future Health Research and Innovation Fund. So in case that's not enough to squeeze on one's business card, in the volunteering and philanthropy space, which is really very important in our state, Dr Tan has also been hugely active and his current roles include as member of the board of the foundation of the WA Museum, as executive chair of Wellspring Foundation and as ambassador for Meridian Global Foundation which is a charitable organisation he co-founded to inspire greater grassroots philanthropy. So please join me in welcoming Dr Tan this evening as he reflects on his career and his Australia story. [Applause]

Dr Marcus Tan: First, I want to acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we're meeting. I pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging and recognise the importance of storytelling and song lines to our First Nations people.

I also want to acknowledge Professor Amanda Davies from UWA for her kind introduction and Alec Coles, the CEO of the WA Museum, whom I've actually had the privilege to get to know a little bit more since joining the board of the foundation of the WA Museum a little over a year ago.

Now, the WA Museum's role as a storytelling organisation is a critical one, particularly at a time where in history we have social media, fake news, alternate facts and when it's hard to separate out fiction from non-fiction. Indeed, both universities and museums have a common responsibility in capturing and disseminating knowledge, preserving learning's hard-won from the past. And whilst respecting and honouring culture and tradition, also seeking to inspire new insights and enabling the future through research and innovation. Stories traditionally, throughout the ages and to the current day, weren't just for entertainment, but remain an important means of communicating ideas, imparting knowledge and wisdom. Stories can move you, they can make you laugh, they can make you cry, make you stop and think, make you understand, make you change your mind, and even make you start a revolution. Make no mistake, stories are powerful. And that's why I was thrilled and honoured to be here today as part of the My Australia Story Public Talk series.

And thank you, Maggie, for asking me to participate in this and organising this. I must say I'm actually in awe of my predecessors in this series and I only hope that you'll get an opportunity to see some of their stories and watch it online and hope I can actually do as good a job of relating my story as they did theirs. This series so far has been a beautiful celebration of resilience, achievements and contributions of first generation Australians from diverse cultural backgrounds. It's a chance to reflect on our journeys and hopefully inspire others to reach their full potential regardless of where they come from. And whilst there are very many commonalities we share between our stories, between myself and my predecessors, I hope I can bring a slightly different perspective. And at the conclusion of my talk, I hope to provide you with what will sound suspiciously like clickbait or book titles from a self help section of the local bookstore. I hope to provide you with tips on how to be exceptional, the secret to discovering lasting happiness and finally ways of finding purpose and fulfilment. You'll just have to stay awake long enough to hear those nuggets. So let's get started.

So Amanda's outlined some of my career achievements and given away a bit of the ending of my story. So that part probably won't come as much of a surprise, but to say that my career has been eclectic is probably an understatement. So rather than focusing too much on what I did, I'd like to mostly share with you how and why I ended up doing what I did. There are some clues from my childhood and growing up that will hopefully set the scene. So let me begin there.

I was born in KL, Malaysia, into a small traditional nuclear family. My father was born in Malacca in Malaysia during the Japanese occupation in World War Two and met my mum in London while she was studying civil engineering and she was training to be a nurse. My mum was born in Shanghai but lived most of her childhood in Hong Kong and Singapore. She only worked briefly as a nurse caring for patients before committing herself instead to caring for her new family after I was born. She was into fashion and made her own clothes and was the creative and stylish one in the family. Whereas my father, the pragmatic engineer, was all function over form and the logical austere one. We moved briefly from Malaysia to Singapore when I was in year one in school when my father was commissioned to build a large hangar at Changi Airport for Singapore Airlines. Not long after that, my father was headhunted to commission a coal mine in the southwest WA town of Collie for the state's electricity generation. This was the opportunity my parents were hoping for to immigrate to Australia, so in late 1980 my family made the move. I was seven years old at the time and my younger brother was three.

Now I know some of you might do the math and work out that I am indeed 50 years old, but I've been told I don't look a single day over 49 so I'm grateful for my mother's genes for that one. Now, more controversially nowadays, it was indeed thermal coal that brought me and my family to this wonderful place and for that I feel conflicted but grateful.

Now growing up in Australia as a scrawny little Asian kid in the 80s certainly was an adventure. Remembering that the White Australia policies, a set of racist policies introduced in 1901 that aimed to forbid people of non-European ethnic origins, especially Asians, from immigrating to Australia, was not formally repealed until 1973 by the Whitlam Labor Government. Coincidentally, that was the same year I was born. So less than a decade later, it would have come as no surprise to still have some racist elements in our community, with slurs yelled out from passing cars or the extreme fire bombings of Chinese restaurants by ultra-right-wing nationalist groups. Now I don't have many strong memories from this time, but some positive memories I do have is the fun I had pretending to be Monkey from the ABC television series, some of you might remember that one. I fashioned a staff out of the long handle of a broken gardening tool whilst my little brother would play the character of Pigsy and brandish a rake from the shed at the backyard there at home.

Now I also remember the tremendous freedom I felt riding my BMX bike around the mean streets of Dianella, a traditionally migrant suburb. As young as nine years old I was, with no adult supervision, and this is something that most responsible parents I suspect nowadays would never dream of allowing. How times have changed. I remember riding around the neighbourhood with my friends and then finishing up the local fish and chip shop, where we would get the occasional treat to play arcade games like Galaxian, Pac-Man and Space Invaders. It wasn't long after this time that my parents bought us an Atari and shortly after a Commodore 64 and I became obsessed with computer games and programming. My favourite books at the time were the Choose Your Own Adventure series and I would be writing software with my own original stories, recreating the way the books allowed the reader to choose the different endings based on certain pivotal moments in the story. They were good times and I suspect where I developed one of my values around freedom and my interest in technology.

Now all in all my early childhood experiences growing up in Western Australia were very normal, however there was one persistent negative experience that stuck with me. I was enrolled in a local Catholic primary school and it was actually here I had my first experience of being different and being a fish out of water. My parents were Buddhist and we grew up with many of the Buddhist customs and philosophies. We had an altar at home, burnt incense and prayed occasionally for prosperity, usually in the form of good health, good grades and good fortune. I had no understanding of religion or what all these rituals really meant but I just went along with it without really questioning it. But all my friends were Catholic and I wanted to hang out with them on the weekends but they were at church on Sundays so whilst I wasn't required to attend Mass, I went there to hang out with my friends and again without questioning I would end up singing the hymns and reciting the prayers and listening to the sermons thinking this was also all pretty normal. However there was one thing that never quite sat well with me. I remember sitting in the church attached to my primary school or sitting on the floor of the school gymnasium for our school assemblies where row after row of students would get up and quietly stand patiently in line to receive communion. Now I would sit in place whilst the kids would walk past me to play out this ritual and everyone got to receive communion except me because I was told I couldn't do that since I wasn't baptised. So I sat awkwardly and painstakingly waiting for it to be over week after week for four agonizing years. For years I tried desperately to fit in. I even had my own set of rosary beads and a cross, a bible and knew the prayers and hymns, even won prizes for knowing the bible passages better than even my Catholic friends. But I never felt fully accepted and that feeling stuck with me. I was an imposter, I was different and not good enough and this would be a recurring feeling that would come and go for me at various times in my life. Now I don't relate to this story to denounce organised religion or to vilify Catholicism but to illustrate that even well-meaning social or institutional rituals and cultural activities can have unintended and long-lasting impacts on people.Inclusion is a fundamental part of growing up but as it turns out it's a human need. Loneliness and social isolation are correlated with not just poorer mental health but also poorer physical health and are increasingly silent killers in our society. My parents were middle class migrants and like most migrants were highly aspirational for their kids to gain the best possible opportunities. They made many sacrifices both financially and personally. My parents always valued education and as soon as they could afford it and a spot was available they moved my brother and I to a prestigious Anglican private school, private boy school. My mum would drive us almost an hour each way to drop us off and pick us up. After a while all that driving became too much and we soon ended up moving out of my old neighbourhood to a suburb much closer to the school. After five years since moving to Australia and at the vulnerable age of 13 the last vestige and contact with the old world of my friends in Dianella was complete and sadly I have not actually had any contact with any of them since. I don't think my parents ever knew that my first real experience of being excluded and different was not really a race or immigrant issue at all but actually on the basis of religion. Now if they did it would have been particularly cruel to then go and change me to an Anglican school after I was trying so hard to fit in at my old Catholic school. On top of this I was one of only a handful of new kids to join at the time, I was an Asian immigrant who wasn't from a particularly wealthy family, one of the smallest kids in my year, I wore nerdy glasses and was being thrown into the deep end surrounded by aggressive hormonal teenage boys in an elite private school setting. What could possibly go wrong?

I was assured it would be fine but needless to say I remember feeling very anxious on my first day at the new school worried about once again being a fish out of water waiting to be mercilessly bullied verbally or physically every day. In a period of a year my life had been upturned but thankfully my parents were right and I started making some new friends. My new friends were mostly academic and nerdy like me and we bonded over our mutual love for computer games and Dungeons and Dragons, chess, strategy games. My fears of being bullied were actually unfounded and whilst I know bullying occurred in our school somehow I managed to largely avoid it and I'm still not 100% sure how. On reflection I was able to adequately hold my own on the sports field, playing tennis, hockey and even getting into the school athletics team. I wasn't winning sports awards by any stretch but it was good enough to gain the respect of my peers. The other effective thing I did unknowingly at the time was I made it a point to acknowledge everyone I passed by in the school corridors, either by name if I knew them or a simple nod and hello if I didn't. I believe that this simple act of acknowledgement got me through high school, not only relatively unscathed but actually thriving and in leadership positions. My childhood would teach me the importance of inclusion, acknowledgement of others and it built my resilience and confidence around being different and gave me the skills to adapt to change.

Now after doing well in high school it was time to work out what I was going to do for a career. And if you would have asked me at the time as a kid what I wanted to be when I grew up, I'd probably have cheekily said either taller or older. And come to think of it if you ask me now what I want to be when I grow up, I'd probably still say the same thing. Taller because that still hasn't quite happened yet and older because whilst no one wants to get old everyone wants to get older. Now frankly even at the age of 17 I still had no idea what I wanted to do. I got good grades and my very traditional and loving Asian parents had given me, who'd sacrificed a lot to give me the gift of education, also gave me the choice of having a career of whatever career I wanted. So long as it was being a doctor. Now in 199,1 as Amanda suggested, I commenced at UWA as a medical student and had a blast in university. I was never really the best student in uni, choosing to be more let's just say well rounded instead of studying all the time. I did get out. I was a bit of a nerd at school in high school and having been wrapped in cotton wool socially after discovering nightclubs, girls and dance music it was pretty eye opening and massively distracting I've got to say. I even had fleeting thought of quitting medicine to become a DJ.

Now at the beginning of my third year of med school I had what I call a sliding doors moment. A family friend approached me to join the committee of a brand new university student organization representing the Chung WA Association, WA's peak Chinese community group. Now there were many good reasons to say no. Third year med was notoriously difficult. My grades weren't already particularly stellar and I was already spending a lot of time with my social pursuits and my friend would probably have understood if I declined his invitation. But by saying yes in that moment it set me on a path that literally changed my life. As a member of that social committee we organised heaps of events like river cruises, nightclub events, quiz nights, barbecues, gala balls. These involved learning how to sell membership, sponsorships and tickets, getting good at project management as well as coordinating people and teams. This was my first exposure to entrepreneurship, leadership and management. Needless to say I almost failed third year med but I went on to become president of that student organization, and as a bit of a side note met my wonderful wife through it.

Sylvia is here tonight and without embarrassing her I want to take a quick detour to acknowledge her. Sylvia and I started dating when she was working as a banker. I was still 21 and in my fifth year of med school. Next year we'll have been together for 30 years. And yes she has the patience of a saint and has made enormous personal and professional sacrifices of her own. As a long suffering wife, the mother to our two terrific sons, of whom we're both very very proud, and a dutiful daughter, her selfless dedication to family is unwavering. She's been the steady rock in our lives and I wouldn't be the person I am without her or her support and belief in me. So thank you very much.

After graduating in 1997 from med school I kicked around the hospital system as an intern and junior doctor. I had my heart set on being a GP having been attached to a great GP as a med student and being inspired by the breadth of knowledge required and the trust and depth of relationships often with multiple generations of one family built up over time. Now hospital medicine felt a little narrow, short term and transactional. I did briefly consider emergency medicine, which was more fast paced than general practice, but I valued the longer term relationship building with patients and the flexibility of owning my own practice and being in total control of my schedule. I knew I could probably earn more financially by pursuing other specialties, and they were arguably more prestigious specialties, but these things didn't drive me frankly and they still don't.

In 2002, that was another watershed year in my career. I was now a fully qualified GP and after my little practice was bought out by a large corporate it felt like medicine was transactional again. So I left to pursue something new and different and was the first doctor hired to grow the concept of dedicated skin cancer clinics in Western Australia. I ended up becoming the medical director for these clinics and enrolled in an executive MBA to round out my commercial and business knowledge. Now these clinics were pretty innovative at the time but grew through a clever combination of brand marketing and use of technology to differentiate themselves in the market. They actually caused quite a stir for the traditional GP’s, dermatologists and plastic surgeons but offered a great affordable and accessible service to patients and a different career pathway for some of the doctors. This gave me my first real taste of disruption and innovation.

That same year I was asked to join the board of a GP organisation which was established to bring local GPs together to find innovative solutions to issues in their area of practice. I was the only Asian and the youngest GP on the board and little did I know I was part of something called a board succession plan. I was exposed formally to governance, systems level thinking, strategy and policy development. A few years later I was the chair of that organisation and ended up on other related boards of peak bodies as a result. I helped usher in changes of CEOs, mergers to form larger more sustainable entities and chaired audit risk and finance as well as nominations, remuneration and governance subcommittees and ended up developing my own board succession plan. These senior leadership roles propelled me into rooms with politicians of all persuasions including state premiers and even prime ministers. This nerdy Asian immigrant kid started developing personal and professional networks he would never have imagined growing up.

Now the interesting thing to note though is that I never actually really aspired to any of it. You might be surprised to hear that I've never been particularly personally ambitious in the sense that I'd never sought out positions of power or influence. Quite the contrary, the Asian part of me was often deferential and happy to take on a role only if no one else wanted to do it and only so long as I could be helpful and add value. I've often been happy to just get stuff done rather than caring too much about the titles. This has led me to a personal philosophy of giving first before having any expectations of what you'll get. It's a slightly different take on the concept of karma but one that has worked well for me throughout my career.

My tech startup journey began in 2006. Now in tech that was the year Twitter, now called X, was launched. Internet Explorer was still the dominant web browser of the day and I was rocking a Nokia flip phone and the iPhone was still a couple of years away. I was in the midst of juggling a full-time clinical, you know, my full-time clinical load, a young family, board roles and having just completed my executive MBA. I found myself sitting at my desk as a GP looking to refer a patient to a specialist and pulling out an out-of-date paper-based directory from a desk drawer and thinking, "Surely in the age of the internet, this should be online." There was no problem about, there was no thought about becoming fabulously wealthy, I just simply wanted to solve a problem I saw. This idea started what I can only describe as an Alice in Wonderland-like journey where I would increasingly confuse and disappoint my mother with my non-medical career choices.

The online health directory I started in 2006 was called MedLink and I started it with a GP friend of mine who had taught himself how to code software. Needless to say, it was a hard slog and we didn't get very far and after two years in the middle of the global financial crisis, we decided to shut it down. Less than a year later, I was introduced to a couple of emergency physicians who had coincidentally also started an online health directory in 2006 and frustrated with the lack of progress they were also about to shut it down. But I saw something in the way they had set it up and felt that they’d actually overcome some of the things that plagued my original directory startup. So instead of shutting it down, I convinced them to let me take it over, to recapitalise it and bring a new team to it, including my co-founders Adam Yat and Darius Wei. In the hope of turning it into something bigger and more sustainable. This directory was called Health Engine, a vertical search engine for all things health. We ended up keeping the name but pretty much gutted it and rebuilt most of it from scratch. Two years later, in 2011, we faced the issue of having grown significant consumer traffic to the directory but our business model was not financially sustainable, which meant we had to find something people would pay for or face shutting the business down. And since it wasn't viable to keep funding the business with our savings and credit cards, we figured that our directory was a good source of the who, what and where of health care, but missed an important piece of information around when those doctors were available. We noticed no one was doing online bookings in health care in Australia.

And so we end up pioneering it in order to get times and availability on our online directory. It was like trying to build Google Maps when there wasn't a GPS system and having to build satellites just to progress the original idea. It was our last roll of the dice and luckily this pivot saved the business. Not long after that, we were approached by Seven West Media and Telstra, the largest media company and telcos in Australia. They wanted to invest in startups together having started their respective corporate venture arms. Just as an aside, I recall a conference call as part of doing their due diligence where there were more accountants and lawyers working for these huge corporates on the call than we had employees in the entire business. It was like they were buying a bank rather than investing in a tiny startup. Anyway, after a lot of back and forth where we almost walked away from the deal several times, in May 2013, Health Engine closed $10.4 million in what was at the time one of the largest funding rounds for a startup of our size in Australian history.

Now, I never set out to be the long term CEO of the business and figured that having raised the cash, I could actually go back to seeing my patients who I'd started to neglect working only part time clinically to run Health Engine. Little did I know that our new investors had plans quite to the contrary and insisted that I quit my clinical work entirely to run Health Engine full time. My first thought was, "Oh boy, how am I going to explain this to my mum?" Anyway, I agreed to put my clinical work on hold for a couple of years to become a fully fledged tech startup entrepreneur. This financing from Seven West Media and Telstra helped us to turbo charge the business and in late 2016 we were introduced to global venture capital royalty, Sequoia Capital. They were early investors in companies like Apple, Google, Nvidia and more recent companies like Airbnb, Zoom and Stripe. In April 2017, news broke in the Australian Financial Review that they had led a $26.7 million funding round into Health Engine as their first investment in Australia.

The journey after that was a real roller coaster ride with many wins including being awarded WA Technology Company of the Year, being the only WA company recognised as one of the top 20 great places to work in Australia, being granted the contract by the federal government to be the national COVID vaccine booking system and the growth of our telehealth business. But it's also not been without its challenges. We've had legal fights, had run-ins with media and regulators and of course we had an unprecedented pandemic that had a large number of our healthcare customers forced to close their doors either temporarily or in some cases permanently, as well as an aborted attempt to list the business on the Australian Stock Exchange at the end of 2021, which actually turned out to be a good thing in hindsight, but it was painful nonetheless.

The Health Engine story is fundamentally a story of growth and resilience. It's the story of a bunch of people who chased a vision of making healthcare better for patients and providers and refusing to give up through significant adversity that would have broken or killed many other teams and companies. In so doing, we also grew as people, learnt new skills, broke through barriers in areas we never thought we would or could. At last count, Health Engine has facilitated over 80 million online bookings for around 14 million people. That's more than half the population of Australia that has used our platform. We've raised around $80 million in capital, generated many multiples of that in direct and indirect economic value for WA, created hundreds of jobs and in doing so, I'm proud to say we continue to do our part in building the capability of the West Australian technology sector because we made a commitment to stay headquartered in WA.

Last year, I stepped down as CEO of Health Engine after a journey that started 17 years prior. I had made a personal commitment to do something different by the time I turned 50 and after spending nine months finding a suitable replacement, I was able to hand over the reins and focus my attention on other things. In truth, the start-up journey, whilst incredibly rewarding, was gruelling and had taken a toll on me physically and mentally and if I didn't make a change, I was heading towards burnout. On reflecting back on my career to date, I've always been driven by my personal values of freedom, passion and inspiration. Having discovered the Japanese concept of ikigai, meaning a reason for being, which offers up a framework describing the intersection of doing what you love, doing what you're good at, doing what the world needs and quite pragmatically doing what you can be paid for, means I've not been much of a big believer in work-life balance, which is why concepts like retirement don't mean much to me because how I spend my time and whether I'm remunerated for that time doesn't define what I constitute as my life.

The curse of social media is that it has perpetuated the idea that you can have it all and you can have it now. My experience has been that to be able to do truly great and impactful things, you require concentrated massive effort and it takes more time and it's harder than you think. In this context, a happy balance between professional, family and personal commitments become incredibly challenging. Some would say nigh on impossible and therefore sacrifices need to be made. This however is a very individualistic and selfish view and doesn't entirely contemplate the other roles and obligations we might have as a life partner, a parent, a son or daughter or a friend. There is a saying that if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. No one succeeds for long as an island unto themselves and this is certainly true in my experience. There have been so many people along the way that have in some small or large ways knowingly and unknowingly helped me on my journey and to them I'm extremely grateful. The truth is you can have it all but probably not all at once. Without the support and understanding of my family, I would not have been able to get as far as I have. Without addressing your physical and mental health, it will also eventually catch up with you.

In medicine, we're taught a process of learning called ‘see one, do one, teach one.’ I feel like I've had the privilege of seeing and doing a lot in the last 50 years. I feel like the next chapter of my life will be in the teach one phase. I've always felt incredibly lucky to have experienced the success of a venture that has made a large impact and those hard-won learnings with something I was keen to give back to the innovation ecosystem. As the chair of Spacecubed, a social enterprise that supports innovators, entrepreneurs and change makers nationally through the provision of co-working spaces, educational programs and community events. I've been able to support and advocate for the broader ecosystem in innovation entrepreneurship at a policy, infrastructure and funding level. And as Amanda mentioned, as the entrepreneur in residence for the RAC's fund and strategic innovation unit called Better Labs and Spacecube's premier accelerator program called Plus Eight, as well as some of the other hats that I wear, I'm currently mentoring directly or indirectly around about 20 to 25 start-ups at any given time. The ability for me to give back in this way is a form of completion for me.

I want to conclude my story by talking about the importance of giving back. The term philanthropy can sometimes seem very lofty and reserved for billionaires, but I have every, I've found everyday grassroots philanthropy to be every bit as rewarding as what I've been privileged to experience in my professional or entrepreneurial journey. Giving can come in the form of volunteering your time, effort, experience and skills. It needn't just be about donating lots of money. In 2005, a small group of business people and professionals, one of them in the audience today, having recognised how blessed and lucky we were to have had very few personal tragedies and having some modicum of professional and business success co-founded the Meridian Global Foundation to encourage more grassroots philanthropy. The thinking was that we didn't feel right about waiting until we were fabulously wealthy, whatever that really means, nor for something bad to happen to ourselves or our family and friends before engaging in giving back in some way. We wanted to be more proactive rather than reactive with our charitable giving. We also believe in the power of collective giving, which allowed us to make a greater impact rather than in dribs and drabs, which would occur if you were to just buy raffle tickets or respond to someone rattling a tin. We created a giving circle where each year members of the giving circle comprising of some frankly amazing like-minded individuals could pool their donations towards supporting a short-listed group of charities that would pitch for a portion of funds raised by the group. With the remainder going towards an investment fund, with the goal of creating a corpus of money that would eventually be large enough to donate a million dollars a year into perpetuity from its investment returns. This was an ambitious project, but one I'm incredibly proud to have been involved in starting and remain an ambassador for. The success of Meridian inspired Sylvia and I to establish our own family foundation called the Wellspring Foundation in 2018 with a donation of a substantial number of our Health Engine shares. With the aim of supporting charities in the areas of health, education and economic empowerment.

Now I'm sometimes asked if I regret choosing medicine as my initial career choice. Despite the cliche, I understand why immigrant families prize careers like medicine. Being a doctor offers security with pretty much guaranteed stable jobs. It offers prestige and besides being financially rewarding, you're also helping people and saving lives. It's a career that pretty much ticks all the boxes. Until today, despite all I've been through, my mum still regularly asks me if I'm still working as a doctor and to see the satisfaction in her eyes when I say, "Yes, mum" still amuses me. And I joke about it now, but the truth is the pressure to succeed was immense. The sacrifices my parents made weighed heavily on me. They uprooted their lives to give me a better future and I felt an immense filial obligation to make them proud and not waste the opportunities they'd given me. Having achieved what many would consider to be career nirvana by becoming a doctor, it almost seemed disrespectful to consider doing anything else. Being a doctor has given me the privilege of witnessing first hand and being part of stories of people experiencing the best moments of their lives and also the worst moments of their lives. I've seen the best of humanity and the worst of humanity. It's shown me the fragility and the strength inherent in all human beings. These experiences have genuinely been gifts and have taught me compassion, appreciation, particularly for living more in the present, but also has given me great hope and optimism for the future. So I don't regret my initial career choice for an instant. Being a doctor is at the core of my identity and I'm grateful for the lens on the world it has provided to me.

However, at one time or another, no matter what our backgrounds and where we come from, we all face tremendous personal and professional pressure to conform and pursue more traditional career and life paths. And there's nothing wrong with that. However, I hope that my story has in some small way inspired and reassured you that you do have choices and not to be afraid to take a road less traveled.

Now you've made it to the end of my talk and I promised at the start that I would share with you some tips on how to be exceptional, the secret to discovering lasting happiness and ways to find purpose and fulfilment, no small order. Many of these insights have been touched upon as a related my story, but let me summarise the takeaways. There are two ways to be exceptional. The first is to be the best in whatever you do, or you can be exceptional by being different. I've learnt that the first requires great skill and talent, but the other requires great courage. I've learnt to accept that as a generalist, jack of all trades, I probably won't be the absolute best at anything. Rightly or wrongly throughout my life, I've always felt like an outsider with huge imposter syndrome and someone that is wired differently. But as time has gone on, rather than being a weakness or disadvantage, I've found that being different is actually a superpower you can harness to stand out, be extraordinary and memorable. Being the best is often about being able to do things others can't, but being different is about being willing to do things others won't. You can push boundaries, challenge accepted thinking and innovate in ways few others can, so embrace it.

Moving on to the secret to discovering lasting happiness, my observation has been that many people try to find happiness in doing or having things or experiences. They confuse happiness with pleasure. In my experience, genuine lasting happiness is not something found externally or from others. My experience is that the secret to lasting happiness comes from within, and the easiest path to it is simply about being grateful. It's about loving what you have versus the pursuit of having what you love. Resilience, optimism and hope for the future are terrific byproducts of gratitude, since it builds an unshakable confidence, some might call it faith, that no matter how bad things get, it will be okay.

Now finally, ways of finding purpose and fulfillment. The challenge of finding your place, your purpose and your identity is a universal human experience. It's not just a migrant issue, it's a human one. We all seek to belong while maintaining our uniqueness. And I've mentioned ikigai as a framework, but I've found that some of the best ways to find purpose and fulfillment comes from simply saying yes a lot, being open to learning, trying new things and meeting new people. Not being limited by your own experience and surrounding yourself with people who inspire you, challenge you, believe in you and encourage you is critical. It has long been known that what motivates and fulfills people is progress towards meaningful goals. What makes something meaningful to one person will be different to someone else. The trick is recognising that you already have the power to define what is genuinely meaningful to you, and it often starts and ends with stories. There is an old saying attributed to the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu. Watch your thoughts, they become your words. Watch your words, they become your actions. Watch your actions, they become your habits. Watch your habits, they become your character. And watch your character, it becomes your destiny. In other words, the stories you tell yourself and others dictates who you become and determines your future.

So as I close out this reflection on my journey to date, I can't help but think about some of the stories that have influenced me in my life that have shaped my beliefs and my hopes and visions for the future. I can see how stories from my childhood, from trusted people in my life and popular media have shaped my thinking and therefore me as a person. And perhaps the stories of the future that stuck with me most was watching episodes of Star Trek, a series that depicts a utopian future where humans, enabled by technology, no longer need money but work doing things they are interested in and enjoy. They explore the universe discovering new things and have a mission of simply going where no man has gone before.

It is said that history doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes. My paternal grandfather, Tan Kim Seng, was born in 1915 and died at the age of 66 from malignant melanoma, a rare skin cancer in Asians. It started on his foot but went on to spread everywhere in his body and eventually killed him. Tragically, if it had been found earlier, his death would have been entirely preventable. He lived through both world wars, was entrepreneurial, he broke through his cultural ceilings by becoming the first Asian state manager of a British trading company in Malaysia. He looked after not just his immediate family but undertook to look after his extended family also and was a pillar of the community as a philanthropist and leader. He was a humble, self-made man and one of my greatest regrets is that I was only eight years old when he died and as we lived in Australia, I didn't get to know him very well before his passing. But the stories my father would tell me about him stuck with me. I don't think it's any coincidence that my career has a stark resemblance to that of my grandfathers and despite his early death, his influence has transcended generations even down to my involvement in developing clinics dedicated to the early detection and treatment of skin cancer and malignant melanoma.

Migrant stories are often about family, taking risks by doing something different and the pursuit of opportunity and a better life. And my migrant story is no different. I didn't choose to migrate to Australia. My parents made that decision. But it's a decision that I'm forever grateful to them for. I've been very fortunate to be very well travelled throughout my life and without sounding too parochial, the more I've travelled, the more I've realised how lucky we are to find ourselves living in the best city in the best country in the world. I hope I have, in some small way, shaped your thinking on your own journeys to find the success and fulfilment. Thank you for listening to my Australia story and I hope one day soon I'll get the opportunity to listen to yours. Thank you very much.

MJ: Thank you so much Marcus for the fascinating stories and the fascinating storytelling. And I also want to thank you for generously sharing the invaluable insights and the wisdom that you've gathered through the journey. Thank you so much. Can I propose we have another round of applause to Marcus? Thank you. So we're now opening up the floor for questions. If any of us want to ask Marcus or sharing your thoughts with Marcus, please let us know. Thank you, Marcus.

MT: No problem. Hi.

Audience Question 1: Yeah, I guess I'd be interested in your thoughts as you look forward. What's going to be the next Health Engine?

MT: What's going to be the next HealthEngine? Are you talking about for me personally or what you think is going to be fantastic for the technology ecosystem?

Audience member: I guess, yeah, for the health of the nation overall. Yeah.

MT: Look, healthcare is one of those sectors where unfortunately technology hasn't exactly taken hold. We still have a lot of stuff that's un-digitized. So it's stuff that you'd imagine should be digitized still isn't. There's still a lot of paper in the sector. I joke that the fax machine is currently still, the health sector is the only thing that's keeping the fax machine alive. And that's still true. So despite the fact that we've got a lot of technology, the adoption of technology hasn't been great in healthcare. Look, you know, being able to aggregate a lot of personal information in a place where you can make better decisions for yourself, I think is always going to be critical. Part of our mission, I guess, at Health Engine was to actually try to give everybody as much information to make as much good decisions for themselves in their healthcare journey. And that hasn't exactly panned out the way that we'd like because it's just taken so long. But at some time, personalized medicine is definitely going to be a thing, whether it's now or in 10 years, we don't know, but it's definitely going to be a thing. And I'm actually really looking forward to when that happens.

Audience member: Thank you.

Audience Question 2: I see a lot of connections in your story and my story, maybe just maybe 20, 30 years behind you on the way. But the question I want to ask is, first time you had to, I guess, shut down your first startup, kind of what did you go through that, like on an emotional scale? What was your mindset going through it? Was it disappointing to go through that? How did you step back up? All those sorts of things. Love to hear a bit more about that.

MT: Yeah, okay. So shutting down startups is not fun because obviously you spend a lot of time trying to work out whether this thing is going to work. There's a saying that feeling, you know, being too early feels a lot like being wrong. And the problem is that when you're innovating, it can take, especially in healthcare, it can take a long time to actually get somewhere. So when you're early and you're getting all the signals that actually this isn't working, you've got to try to somehow trust your instincts on no, no, I've got to keep plodding on and keep pushing forward. Or at some point, just go, you know what, this isn't going to work, right? And sometimes that's forced on you because you run out of money, or you run out of like, you know, goodwill from the people around you. But, you know, you do have to find that balance. The emotions are difficult. I think a lot of people who go into startups, particularly if you are, say, doctors or whatever we are fairly accomplished people, we're not used to failing, right? It's not a sort of mindset that you generally have. So failure, not knowing stuff and being vulnerable is actually pretty tough. But obviously, sometimes you just got to do what you have to do. Restarting again, it's often back to being purpose driven, right? So if you actually have a mission that you want to do something and you're driven by that, you'll always find ways of coming back to it and finding a different solution to solving that problem that you care about. So it's actually not that hard to restart. It's actually really hard to stop though, because obviously you put your heart and soul into something and you don't really want to see it go. But yeah.

Audience Question 3: Hi, Marcus. P. K. Lo. I was just wondering, do you think there are any similarities between helping baby companies and being a GP, helping young families and young children? Do you think there's any similarities or is it totally different?

MT: There are definitely similarities, right? I mean, I think GPs, they say that GPs as a role, we're there to interpret patient narratives. What that really means is that we listen to people's stories and we've got to pick out of those stories what to do next. You know, we solve problems by listening to stories. And that's actually not different to startups. I mean, like, you know, I've been a management consultant as well. So I think that at some point, you're having to listen very closely and trying to work out what the symptoms really mean and get to the root cause of what the problem is. And that's not different whether you're dealing with a business or we are dealing with a patient or you're dealing with a startup. They all have different issues and you've got to try and work through, like what is the little thing that you can do to actually keep moving them forward. So really, actually, those skills are actually highly transferable, I found certainly as a GP, just the ability to kind of listen and be able to kind of quickly in 15 minutes or so try to work out exactly what to do next. I think that's a super helpful skill for sure.

Audience member: Thank you.

Audience Question 4: Marcus, thank you for sharing. Fascinating story. Some of them perhaps lived as well and resonates well. Regret is not something people with problem solving ability ever do. But if you had a magic wand, would you change anything?

MT: Depends on which area, right? I mean, look, I tend to be very forward focused. I don't tend to be very, you know, regret is not really something that forms part of my personality. As I mentioned, you know, not getting to know my grandfather was probably one of the big regrets, not something within my control, of course. Probably the other regret I have is that, look, you know, as I said, some of the sacrifices you make, particularly around family and so on, you don't get some of that time back, unfortunately. And hopefully the sacrifices and hopefully success in the achievements that you have, particularly for your kids, gives you the ability to say, look, this is kind of worthwhile because it helped a lot of other people and that, you know, you can kind of be a role model for them. But you still miss a lot of that personal time with them. So I think these are the sorts of regrets that, you know, that unfortunately, tradeoffs that you have to make. But, you know, honestly, regrets are not really my thing. I think it's more about just what do you learn from this stuff and how do you move forward, right? You know, some of these things aren't within your control either. So, yeah.

Audience Question 5: First of all, thank you, Dr. Tan, for such an inspiring story. I have a couple of questions, actually. So the first one is, when you decided to do startup, instead of being a full time clinical doctor, did you find that your medicine degrees kind of gave you the extra courage to do that? Because it's like a full back plan. Let's say if startup fails, you can always go back to become a doctor and get financial stability to raise your family. And whether you find that medicine degree help you gain credibility when you work with other health care professionals in your startup?

MT: Yeah, look, obviously, I think just to answer your second part of your question first, obviously, when you're building a startup where you're trying to get other doctors to try and, you know, adopt the thing that you've built, it helps if you've got professional networks that kind of trust you. I mean, trust me, they thought I was a little crazy at the time. And me, for me to kind of go, look, I sat in waiting rooms waiting for them to come out to get me so that I can sort of pitch them this idea. And I have to go, look, I know it sounds crazy, but just trust me on this one. Can you just help me out? And that's the nice thing about medicine. I mean, people are collegial and particularly early adopters, they also kind of see that this could be helpful and they'll give you a go. So certainly being a doctor helps when you're within your own community, right? On the first question, I think having safety nets is a difficult one. You know, in startup life, you kind of have to be all in. It's really hard to be focused one, you know, one, one eye one way and one eye the other. In saying that it didn't hurt that if this thing failed, I could go back to medicine, right? Sure. You know, people in all spheres of life take risks. And in some cases, you know, people, it's the kind of cliche of actors who have to bus tables and restaurants in order to achieve their career goals of becoming film stars and that sort of thing. We got lucky that, you know, my friend of I, when we first started our original startup, the other GP that could code, he actually wanted to be an actor and, you know, and actually managed to get himself through acting and film, you know, acting school and performance, that sort of thing, by actually doing GP sessions and stuff like that instead of having to bus tables. So in that regard, it was kind of handy that we didn't have to accept the lower pay grade in order to do that and to sustain our startups. But it's typically not the sort of thing we would suggest is try and have your safety net all the time, because if you do, you tend to not be willing to go the extra yard to go forward. There's this thing called burning the boat. So I don't know if you're familiar with that concept. It says if you're going to try and do something, you don't want to have a path of retreat because you want to just get it done or you die doing it sort of thing, and that's, I know it's a bit extreme, but that's kind of, you know, the thinking. But yes, it was a nice safety net to have.

Audience Question 6: Hi, I was just wondering when you introduce such like a disruptive kind of technology to the medical field, what was the general outlook and how was business and business people reacting to you?

MT: Okay, Great. Good question. It wasn't so much business people that were responding to us, it's actually just the health care sector. So when you're asking... Let me let me take this another way. Healthcare is what you sometimes call a long fuse, big bang sector, right? So when you're trying to innovate into something like healthcare, you've got to kind of expect it to just grumble along. The uptake's very, very slow because in general, people in healthcare are conservative, and necessarily so, right? You don't want Mavericks in healthcare. You don't want to have stuff that could potentially kill people if you get it wrong. So adopting stuff, you're generally a bit skeptical to start with. That's why you need heaps and heaps of clinical trials and research and all that stuff, just to back up to make sure it's safe and that it actually does what it says on the tin. So on that background, you sort of expect that people are always going to push back a little bit when you're challenging what's kind of the current status quo and asking them to do something completely different. So in that regard, I wasn't surprised, but it does take a long time. And so healthcare is not the easiest industry to disrupt. There are a lot of incumbents. There are a lot of people who almost don't want you to succeed. And you've just got to keep pushing on and trusting that you're actually doing it for the right reasons. And in our case, it was to help the doctors, but also to help patients and being patient-centered and patient-first was what drove us. And hopefully all other doctors will kind of go, yes, this is better for patients. And that's ultimately what it's all about. All right. Thanks.

MJ: Well, thank you, everyone, for your excellent questions. Thank you very much. Well, now, can I invite Mr. Alec Cole to give us some concluding remarks? Thank you, Alec.

Alec Coles: Well, thank you. Thanks, Maggie, for organising this series, Amanda, for your collaboration, and of course, Marcus, for another wonderful evening. As Marcus said, we've got to know each other better over the last year, and it's been a pleasure and an honor. And it's really lovely to be able to stand here this evening and pay tribute and to thank him for that presentation. It became very clear to me straight away that Marcus is not somebody who does things by halves. He throws himself into everything he does. You heard that extraordinary CV at the beginning, all the things he does do. I don't quite know how he fits it all in, but there are some people who do that for their CV, and there are some people who actually walk the walk. And he's clearly somebody who does that. And it's interesting, there were a lot of things you said that resonated with me. And I thought there were lots of similarities with Marcus, except of course, he's much smarter than I am. But the parental sacrifice was one. The influence of your grandfather, actually, I had a very similar experience, and much of what I do is influenced by a wonderful grandfather. And I'm somebody who always says yes first and then works out how to do it later, and I get the impression that that's exactly what you do. And I'm also somebody who doesn't do regret because there's not much point, really. And I would say, look, I cannot believe that you don't give just as much to your family as you give to all your other projects. But you mentioned some of the sacrifices. I made those sacrifices when my kids were younger and if it's any consolation, I'm closer to them today than I've ever been. So take heart from that. You mentioned right at the beginning some of your experiences early on about racism. And that's something I have to say that I still feel today. It's controversial, but we do live in a country that has a huge amount of racism, much of it in our faces, some of it under, every week, which is raw with me only today. I got another complaint to the museum about ‘it's all Aboriginal stuff’ and all that kind of thing. And I find that really, really quite depressing. But look at how you've risen above it and look at how you've succeeded. That's wonderful.

I loved your points at the end there. I think it's fair to say you are different, but you're definitely not an imposter. And that's been proven by your extraordinary achievements. And to refer to that split infinitive, you're clearly boldly going where no man's gone before in some of those areas. It's just such a privilege, as I say, to be able to give a vote of thanks here. And you did say that your ambitions were to be taller and older. I always think, and when you get to my age, you definitely don't want to be older, but I always take heart from that. It was attributed to Francis Bacon, I don't think he probably said it, but old age is always 15 years older than you are. So I'm going to take heart from that and stay with that. But in terms of being taller, it's not about physical stature, because in every sense, in what you do in WA, in your firm, you are a giant. And it's a privilege for me to be working with you now. And it's a privilege for us to have heard your story this evening. So thank you very much indeed.

MJ: Please remain on the stage. Now I also invite Professor Amanda Davies and Dr. Marcus Tan back to stage to present. We have Amanda and Alec to present some more thanks to Marcus.