Parsa named his company after the ancient city of Babylon, which, according to the Greek historian Herodotus, had a square where citizens gathered to share tips on how to treat their ailments.
Former employees say Parsa was obsessed with “blitzscaling”—the kind of entrepreneurial hypergrowth popularized by LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman. The company went on uncontrolled hiring sprees, ex-employees say, and teams were often working on overlapping projects. Three teams were working on three different, mutually incompatible versions of the symptom checker at one point, says an ex-employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The employee says they once found a product manager wandering the building on his second day at the company. He had been left looking for a team to work with because nobody had onboarded him or told him where he should be. “He assumed it was some kind of onboarding ‘challenge’ to just find a team to join,” the employee says.
The C-suite experienced lots of turnover. Senior leadership would go on retreats to Antigua, which wasn’t widely known by staff—until it was leaked on a public Slack channel. Parsa “once presented a stand-up from Antigua while pretending to be in his office,” one ex-employee says. Former staff say Parsa’s leadership style was “idiosyncratic” and “occasionally megalomaniacal.” At one point, Parsa tried to ban Microsoft PowerPoint at the company. Workers, whom Parsa referred to as Babylonians, were chastised by the CEO for leaving at 5:30 pm, Harvey says.
Parsa’s rush for scale outpaced Babylon Health’s ability to actually put out finished products, according to former employees. After Harvey joined, the company reassured him that its data science team was working on a knowledge graph, which connects bits of knowledge by probabilities. What this looked like was Harvey and his clinician colleagues answering thousands of medical questions, like “What is the probability of someone with jaundice having hepatitis?” The questions progressively became more fine-grained; what's, say, the probability of someone having two weeks of jaundice and having hepatitis B?
“The questions just became more and more ridiculous and unrelated,” Harvey says—and it still wasn’t really AI. (Another former employee of Babylon Health, who worked on the AI team, says that it’s likely that the machine learning team just showed Harvey Excel spreadsheets for simplicity, but admits the decision tree model was “not particularly sophisticated.”)
At one point, the BBC were scheduled to visit the office to film the technology. But there was one problem: The app hadn’t been finished yet. It had only been modeled for gastroenterology; basically, stomach problems. It had no interface, so Harvey recalls a data scientist having to sleep in the office for several nights and over the weekend as they raced to build something that looked like an app. “But we all knew … that's not the product we're building,” Harvey says. “This is a mock-up of something that has been put together in haste with a lot of man-hours to demonstrate to the BBC.” Harvey’s account was corroborated by another former employee.
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