Do physicians make good health tech founders? Having lived this journey and also observed health tech startups started by all kinds of folks, I’ve come to appreciate the answer is nuanced. ✅ADVANTAGES I’ve seen with physician entrepreneurs: 👩‍⚕️ Easier access to healthcare stakeholders to validate ideas or acquire early reference customers. Not only do you already have a network, but also clinicians or administrators who don’t know you will trust you more than a healthcare outsider. Even when I was just a 4th year med student starting SeamlessMD, I had physician mentors who made intros for me or had folks more willing to take my cold-call because I was “in the community”. 🏥 Deep understanding of day-to-day clinical workflows, medical lingo and healthcare dynamics. Acquiring this knowledge can extend the time it takes an outsider to truly understand the problem and arrive at a viable solution that fits the clinical workflow. When we were doing initial customer discovery for our company, I easily understood the feedback from physicians and administrators. But with all the clinical lingo thrown around, I can see why it would be more difficult for an outsider to navigate, especially in the early stages. 🤓 Unique subject matter expertise in a clinical area. Physicians may have deep insights into a very specific area of medicine that took years to develop. Only you and a handful of other people like you could bring this specific innovation into the world. ❌ DISADVANTAGES I’ve seen with physician entrepreneurs: 🔬 Over-index on the value of research for driving adoption. Time can be spent trying to publish a 50-patient feasibility research study when in the same timeframe you could have obtained a 500-patient sample with a quality improvement approach instead. Physicians can be misguided into thinking that they are one perfect RCT away from widespread adoption. Solid clinical evidence may get a foot in the door, but social proof, marketing, sales, customer success and more is often far more impactful on adoption. 💡 Give up on ideas too quickly. With all the barriers physicians have experienced trying to adopt new innovations, they can dismiss the potential of ideas too quickly: “that’s never going to work”. They may spend too long looking for the “perfect” idea. Instead, they need to learn to iterate an idea to its full potential. 💰 Difficulty making effective tradeoffs between the original vision and business viability. Due to perverse incentives, solutions that would help the healthcare system the most tend to face more obstacles to adoption. Entrepreneurs may have to modify their vision to make the economics of the business work. For example, you may be a family physician who built a solution originally for primary care, but discover that only specialists are willing to pay you enough for your business to be viable. Non-physicians may be more willing to steer away from the original vision to better unit economics. What other advantages or disadvantages would you add?