Why Physician Founders Outperform in Healthcare Startups with Dr. David Lortscher

What happens when physicians bring clinical insight into the startup world?

In this episode of the Startup Physicians Podcast, Dr. Alison Curfman sits down with dermatologist, founder, and author Dr. David Lortscher, co-founder of a teledermatology company that scaled to hundreds of employees, served 5 million patients, and reached a billion-dollar valuation.

They discuss why physicians are uniquely positioned to identify real healthcare problems, what makes doctor-led startups so powerful, and why clinical expertise must be paired with humility, curiosity, and the right co-founder dynamic. Dr. Lortscher also shares insights from his book, Why Doctors Win, including the data behind physician-founded healthcare companies and the common patterns he found among successful physician entrepreneurs.

This conversation is for physicians who see problems in healthcare and wonder whether they might be the right person to help solve them.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Dr. David Lortscher

00:59 From Dermatology to a Billion-Dollar Startup

03:33 How Physicians Spot Problems Others Miss

07:58 What Successful Physician Founders Have in Common

10:16 The Data Behind Why Doctors Win

13:42 Learning Business Without Losing Clinical Insight

19:19 Finding the Right Co-Founder

24:49 How to Test an Early Startup Idea

26:07 Building a Startup Plan That Creates Leverage

30:08 Where to Find David and Why Doctors Win

Resources

Connect with Dr. David Lortscher: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidlortschermd/

Read Why Doctors Win: https://www.amazon.com/Why-Doctors-Win-Creating-High-Impact/dp/B0FXMQF3J6

Want to go deeper?

Launchpad: https://www.startupphysicians.com/launchpad

Free Resources: https://www.startupphysicians.com/resources

Incubator: https://www.startupphysicians.com/incubator

Transcript

Alison Curfman (00:01.198)
Hi everyone, welcome back to the Startup Physicians podcast. This is your host, Dr. Alison Curfman, and I'm joined today by a colleague, Dr. David Lortscher who has a very inspiring message for physicians. He has a journey that I think is a little parallel to mine, but is also just a great example and has some really, really impressive evidence of why doctors are good.

contributors to startups and why they succeed as founders and co-founders. So David, thank you so much for joining me today.

David Lortscher (00:37.446)
Yeah, great to be here, Allison.

Alison Curfman (00:39.32)
Can you share a little bit about your clinical background and then your journey into the startup space?

David Lortscher (00:45.102)
Yeah. So I'm a dermatologist by training. I did my residency at UCSD and I started practicing, in 2012, at a great practice out in the middle of New Mexico and ended up within six months getting an idea to found a startup. And, happy to go into a little bit about the early days. Cause I know your, your listeners can be interested in that. and so, you know, the way it worked for me was that I was, I was, you know,

very busy, like all new dermatologists, right? So many specialties are in great need. And, you know, as soon as I walked into this practice, which two other physicians started, I had a six month waiting list, not because I was a great dermatologist, but just because the need was so great. And back in 2012, this was like, you know, five years after the iPhone came out. And so this was the core time when everybody was building a telehealth app, right? It's like 50 % of the population now had iPhones in 2012.

And so was clear that this was going to transform how medicine was delivered, how care was delivered to patients. But what I kept seeing is that for my patients, when I was looking for these telehealth solutions, none of them really seemed to actually solve the problem in my mind. And really at the time there were already probably at least 10 telehealth apps specifically for dermatology. But for various reasons, none of them seemed to work for my patients. And so what I did is I ended up deciding to throw my hat in the ring.

start my own telehealth company. And, you know, over the 10 years I spent as co-founder and CEO of the company, you know, we grew to hundreds of employees, treated 5 million patients, had, you know, achieved valuation of a billion dollars and all sorts of these fun milestones, but learned an absolute ton along the way. And since I've retired from that, from that business, I've started looking into, you know, what is it that

enables physicians to succeed at startups because I've had so many colleagues that joined startups as physicians and were able to contribute to their company's success. And I really tried to look into that from a scientific perspective.

Alison Curfman (02:55.554)
That's such an incredible journey and congratulations on the work that you did there. And especially the impact. think that's what really drives a lot of physicians more than anything is like your stat of seeing 5 million patients. I mean, being able to bring care to people in a way that they hadn't had access to before is really, really meaningful. So how did you get started? I mean, I think a lot of people...

David Lortscher (02:55.794)
Thank

Alison Curfman (03:25.248)
are actually a great founder type. They have what it takes, but they just don't know anything about the space. So how did you get started? Did you have mentors in startups? Had you had advisors in the past? Did you just read about it? How did you decide, I'm going to start a startup?

David Lortscher (03:48.548)
It started with, is, think how a lot of physicians end up if they found a startup, how it starts is that they, they notice a clinical need in a way that's hard to do if you're an outsider, right? I see so many healthcare companies started by like, I'm an investor. I was a consultant, but, the people who I think are best positioned to spot these real needs are doctors. And that's what happened to me, right? I was just in practice. I had, a spot to go to a fellowship in dermatopathology UCLA the next year. So I had no plans of founding a startup at the time.

But the need that I saw was that there are so many patients who just could not access dermatology care, right? But now it should be so efficient and easy for these people to so why wasn't this being solved? And when I looked at the 10 other or so teledermatology apps or websites out there, what I saw is that like the typical one would charge a patient about $60 for what we call an asynchronous consult, right? And as all dermatologists know,

These asynchronous consults are just like photos and text, right? And that's the best way to do telehealth and dermatology. like, you know, video just doesn't work for looking at people's skin. Um, but what I saw is that for a dermatologist, if you're seeing a telehealth consult for something relatively simple, um, it, should be able to do this in my mind in about 30 seconds. Um, and what I was seeing with the, with the other apps out there is they would charge the patient $60, 30 that would go to the dermatologist. But if you're paying the dermatologist $30 for every visit.

To some people that sounds really low. It's like, I'm used to getting $200 to see a patient in my office. But in my mind, that was too high. Like, what if we could actually get dermatologists to see these consults for $5? And then all of a sudden, we could open up access to so many more people. And that's ultimately what we did. And so that was sort of the key belief I had at the beginning, that we could actually make these things much more effective. And it took a lot of operational clinical knowledge, because as a dermatologist, what I knew I needed to do was think of every possible use case. Like, let's say a patient comes in for active

And I think it's being caused by some obscure milk-based protein powder they're using. I don't want to have to type that out to them or somehow in this back in 2012, you're typing things, right? So what you would do is memorize 300 different keyboard shortcuts, like a dot followed by three letters. And then no matter what their diagnosis is and what lifestyle changes you need to make, you could type it to them in like four seconds. And so our patients ended up saying, wow, I've never had care this insightful and this customized.

David Lortscher (06:08.658)
But what we saw from the clinician perspective is each consult only took us 30 seconds. And so what this created was a huge volume of like untapped demand from patients who thought they couldn't see a dermatologist either because it was too expensive or it was too far away for them or the wait time was too long. And so we aim to solve all three of those problems. And to go to the other part of your question, you know, once I had that idea, how did I get the mentorship? I was very lucky because my best friend growing up, you know, we went to the same schools from,

from elementary on to like our public high school, ended up going to Harvard Business School and worked at Goldman Sachs. So he was really plugged into the investment community, the startup world. And he was able to give me the mentorship from a business perspective. And we could talk about the advice he gave me, but it was absolutely key to have him as just a constant resource as I was building the company.

Alison Curfman (06:58.902)
Yeah, I mean, it's so important to surround yourself with the right people, because if you spend all of your time with people who are plugging along at their clinical job and doing what most people do when they see problems, which is complain about them, you're never going to break out of that environment and just see more, see more that you're able to do, see opportunity, see a chance to change something.

That's why I love spending time with founders and spending time with people in venture is that they're just very, in general, think, optimistic about the future and see just opportunities everywhere. Now, not everything is the same level of opportunity, but I think that it's an ability to see the potential for change. And a lot of it is formulaic, too. Like what makes a good concept? What makes a good founder?

That's why you see people who have a successful startup and then they go and they like do some more. Like that's why people become serial entrepreneurs is they use the same concepts and learnings they had for one concept. Now they apply it to another concept. Everything needs some of the same stuff. And so I think that your point about having great mentors or advisors or people who knew the space and were able to be a sounding board for you is probably a huge

part of why you were able to get through those early stages and find success.

David Lortscher (08:26.002)
Absolutely. And so what I've been spending my last two years on is writing this book for physicians who are curious about startups, whether it's like starting their own or joining one and trying to provide that mentorship that I had, but many, many other physicians in my space wouldn't have had just because their best friend wasn't an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. And so basically looked into, as I was interviewing all these other health tech

founders for my book, you know, for example, like the physician founder of the AI scribe company, a bridge or the physician founder of up to date, the physician founder of Doximity. what I saw with this, these people is exactly what you say. Like there's, there's, there's actually formulas that were key from startup to startup to startup. And, and what, what a lot of these people did is, is, dip their foot into the startup community before, before they were ready to launch their own. So, you know, for example, for with.

with Shiv from Abridged, what he did is build his own apps when he was in residency, just simple apps to help him and his co-residents collect journal articles that might be relevant to their patients. But from building an app, you realize what goes into making a product usable, and then you realize, okay, once you have a product that you think is so cool, it actually is really hard to get other people to use it. You can't just be like, if you build it, they will come. And same thing with Dr. Gross from Doximity. He was building his own apps. And then when you look at Dr. Shreev, one of the founders of

of crossover health, what he did to get into the startup community was he was blogging, he was speaking, and just saying, this is where think healthcare needs to go, and interviewing people like you're doing, learning about what are the opportunities to improve healthcare. I saw a lot of people who I interviewed for the book working with the HealthTech Incubator. So the founder of Shockwave, he was working with Biodesign at Stanford.

And basically just being like, like, you know, all these companies are coming through with their different like medical device ideas. How can, how can, how can I, as a physician help you figure out how to validate them? Like what sort of, what sort of steps we need to take so that clinicians will, will actually know whether this is helpful to patients. So there's so many different ways to dip your foot into the startup community. And that's that I think that's, that's the biggest, the biggest thread I saw running through all these companies.

Alison Curfman (10:42.452)
And I am so impressed by your book and the information that you shared with me even at the beginning of this call. But what did you find in the data that said validated your hypothesis about physician founders?

David Lortscher (10:58.29)
Well, yeah, this was the craziest thing. So when you look back at the hundred most valuable healthcare companies found in the past four decades, right? Just like think to yourself about what some of them are. The number one most valuable is Intuitive Surgical. That was founded by a physician. The number two most valuable company in healthcare founded over the past four decades is Gilead, also founded by a physician. Number four is Regeneron, also founded by a physician. And going all the way down these top 100 most valuable companies,

51 % of them had at least one physician founder. So it was really remarkable to me to see, especially since when you look at healthcare startups overall, only 17 % have a physician founder. So basically what you see is this huge outperformance. And what I took that to mean is not that necessarily physicians make better founders than non-physicians, but when you're founding a company, domain expertise is important. And I think in any other industry, like if you're founding a software company, you're going to have a software engineer on the team, right? If you're founding like,

A legal company probably going have a lawyer on the founding team, but like for some reason in healthcare that doesn't happen. And I think it's because a lot of physicians shy away from entrepreneurship for various reasons. but, but when a startup does have a physician as a co-founder adding that clinical insight, it really can be a huge lever for, for the startup. And the other, the other reason that, you know, the data led me to write this book is that when you think about those 83 % of healthcare startups that don't have a physician on this founding team.

they still need that clinical guidance and not just because it's better for patients, but because it's better for the business, right? It's gonna ultimately create a better business. And so they need a physician executive who's in a position to help direct the company, point them in the right direction, right? So what I'm trying to help is get all of these other physicians who have an inclination to help patients at a larger scale, maybe beyond the one-to-one scale where we help them in clinic, help these people get.

get a position where they can actually make a difference in startups.

Alison Curfman (12:55.15)
That's incredible. I feel like you're saying all the things that I'm always trying to tell physicians, because you and I have such a similar story and background. And being involved from the very, very beginning of a concept and having it come out of a real clinical need that you're seeing. I often challenge physicians to start thinking, what is a problem in health care that you think you could solve? And you're right that there are a lot of

companies, many companies, majority of companies in the healthcare sector that don't include physicians in the founding team or until a little bit of a later stage if they bring them in at all. And I think the stats that you're sharing about these top 100 companies are really compelling. I see how having been in it from the very beginning of a concept, how

You can see how those strategy and the clinical insight and that domain expertise really needs to get woven into the fabric of what the company is going to become. And you're right that you wouldn't start a legal company without a lawyer. But I think in healthcare, people have a lot of personal experiences with healthcare and it triggers this drive, this founders drive in them. Maybe their child had diabetes and they had an experience and now they're like, wow, there's so much

opportunity in this market to improve it. I'm going to go do that." I think you're right that a lot of physicians see the problem, think they could make it better, and instead feel just kind of discouraged and frustrated with the system. They don't feel empowered to change it. Most people don't know anyone in venture. They don't know anyone who's founded a startup.

David Lortscher (14:43.142)
Yeah. Yeah. And they don't have any, any background in business. And it's funny because that it definitely, I think gives us a psychological barrier to wanting to start a company. But, what I saw is that looking at all these companies where they were physician founded, first of all, like in most cases, the physician ended up being the CEO, even if he or she didn't have business experience. And, in my view, that is usually the right choice. You want the CEO to be the person who has the domain expertise.

But the other thing is that all these people had tremendous humility and curiosity. So they didn't just say, you know what, fuck it. Like I don't know anything about business, but I'm gonna start a company anyways. They said all of that and I'm gonna learn about business. I'm gonna put everything I can into learning about business. I'm gonna like read biographies of Steve Jobs or like great inventors of the past. Like I'm gonna learn about finance, you know, and it's not easy to do that. But you know, as much as it's important to recognize that the clinical expertise is invaluable,

You also have to recognize that all the other stuff that we don't know about, about marketing and hiring, are just as important. So, so the positions that succeed are really the ones that A, you have to have like the right idea, join the right type of startup. And, and, know, this is, this is why my book is called Why Doctors Win. It's like, you have to do all these things, right? You have to find the right people to work with. You have to, you have to find the right startup with the right idea. And as clinicians, we are well positioned to figure out whether a startup is going to win.

but we need to do the research and we need to know how to do the research. So I tried to break that down in the book and then, and then, but when you do join, then that's when the humility really starts. Cause you, I see a lot of doctors join startups from a position of like, let me teach you guys how things work. And that the way that the people who really succeed approach it is let me learn from you. Like, you know, approach it like you approach this with humility. Like you're not telling people anything you're learning and you're guiding. but like everything you try to guide the company to do should, should be more framed as like, as a question, as a suggestion.

And you should ideally spend more time learning from your colleagues than you spend teaching your colleagues.

Alison Curfman (16:43.662)
Absolutely. Those are two principles that I speak on a lot is that the things that trip people up are either not having enough confidence and not understanding the value of their domain expertise and never getting started, or having sort of this arrogance or rigidity about the way things have to happen and being so focused on being the last word that.

that you don't actually get the growth and the other perspectives because in a startup, the clinical expertise is of course super, super valuable, but if you don't get the thing to make money, it's not gonna work. It is not gonna work. so all the other pieces that make a business run are critical and you have to go into it realizing that like the first time you put a central line in, you didn't know what you were doing. You did a see one, do one, teach one, et cetera.

you have to be willing to feel like an intern again. I feel like an intern so many days of my life because I do new things all the time. And I don't expect myself to be an expert. I've told the joke multiple times that I showed up at my fancy private equity firm with startups for dummies. And I was literally trying to get it into my brain. How do I actually operate in this space? And I was told.

totally okay with the fact that there were a lot of things I didn't know. And by being really open to learning and curious, they poured a ton of resources into me and I grew. But I think that one thing that physicians are really good at, if they can bring that humility piece, we are so good at learning. We spent our whole lives learning. Like we have a...

a black belt in learning and finding resources. I think the other thing that's really interesting about starting a business that relates to the clinical side of things, I'm an ER doctor. I know that I don't know everything. I know that there's, can kind of categorize things as they come in as emergent or not emergent and what organ system, but I call consults. I call consults all the time when I've figured out like, this is...

Alison Curfman (18:55.596)
out of my range and I need to call surgery or I need to call neurology. And that doesn't, that's a skillset of triage and assessing what do I know, what do I not know, who can help me? And that's what you do in a startup. You say, well, what do I know? I know this clinically, what do I not know? I have no idea what the payer model is gonna look like, who can help me? I'm gonna get someone to connect me to do a pitch with the payers and we're gonna get feedback.

And so I think that the doctors that do really well in this space are, like you said, the ones that are willing to be open about their lack of knowledge, willing to learn. I do think it's easier to learn business than it was to learn medicine, clinical medicine. So I'm curious your thoughts on that.

David Lortscher (19:44.41)
I mean, it's, funny. It is, it is really a dichotomy where you need the confidence, but also the humility. But I think the way you described it as like, you need to be willing to go back to being like that fourth year med student or that intern. Like that's the perfect example. Cause it's like, you know, we all think exactly, exactly. So no, think that's, that's exactly it. You just really need to go back to that learning phase and it isn't, it isn't rocket science. You can all learn it, but you need to have that, that hunger.

Alison Curfman (19:57.55)
but we won't make you wear a short white coat.

Alison Curfman (20:11.032)
So that brings me to another question, which is, so here you are, you understand that your clinical expertise is great, you have a great idea, maybe you have a great founder profile, but you see the gaps of what you don't have, what would you suggest for finding, what's the ideal co-founder? I gained so much from my co-founders, I love them, I will always love them.

We all had very different minds, different skill sets, and we came together and created something beautiful. But it doesn't always work out that well. So curious to you about what's the ideal co-founder for a physician startup founder?

David Lortscher (20:52.018)
So in the 10 physician successful founders I interviewed, the pattern I saw again and again was a clinical oriented founder and a tech oriented founder. And that goes for every single type of company all the way up to like the AI company. So for example, you look at Viz.ai, you look at a bridge. both, came from, they had a CEO coming from medicine, they had a CTO coming from machine learning.

And to me, is the key power. The thing that I didn't see very often was I need a business co-founder. Like I need a consultant or Harvard Business School graduate. Like I did not see many of those. The one exception where I think a business co-founder could be really useful is if, let's say you're in pharma, right, or biotech and you're like, you've invented this molecule, you need to figure out how to take that to market. There's just so much really specialized knowledge of how to get that through the FDA, how to get that through payers and like how to commercialize that.

that one of the founders I interviewed, Dr. Kathy High, she brought in a founder who would run that business side so she could focus on getting the molecule finally clear to the FDA. And he was running all the patent stuff and the business development deals and the financing. But for the most part, what I find is you want a tech founder and you want a clinical founder.

You know, some people would argue that these days where it's easier to vibe code, you may not need a tech founder, but I think to get something that is actually amazing quality, it's like, sure. Vibe coding is great. We're going to, you know, probably machines are going to a hundred percent of our code, but you want someone who's an absolute tech genius managing that process. So I would still say the tech co-founders key.

Alison Curfman (22:34.51)
I am again in alignment with you. I love the doors that it has opened up to be able to vibe code. And I just don't think that people fully appreciate what it takes to get something to production ready. I mean, you can get an MVP. I think it's a great way for a non-technical person to be able to kind of express some of their ideas in the form of like, what could this look like? What would this look like? Maybe it'll help you recruit the right technical co-founder.

David Lortscher (23:00.07)
Yes.

Alison Curfman (23:01.23)
But one of my co-founders who really managed a lot of the technical side of things was more product-based and she was just this amazing combination of development understanding and strategic business planning and bringing it back to the core team of I'm building the clinical model. Now we're discussing it. She's taking all of that clinical strategy and getting it into our product roadmap, which

That's what the dev team works off of, whether you're using a bunch of agents to code for you for development, or if you're using humans that are overseeing agents, or back in the day, back in 2022, when we were using a whole team of humans. The point is, you can code and code and code and code forever. You could code anything. You could vibe code anything. You could just keep building all sorts of additional features if you don't have that strategic oversight of making sure that it is actually

ticking and tying with the goals of the business at that stage, like a really great technical co-founder or product co-founder will know exactly the vision for the product and how the technology is going to support the business. You will say, hey, wouldn't it be cool if we could do this too? And they will say, that is a feature in version 3.2, which will be coming out in November.

David Lortscher (24:23.26)
Yes, yes.

Alison Curfman (24:25.74)
And there's after our next fundraise, there's a reason strategically that it's been put there and not sooner. We recognize that there is a strategic order to things and that we got to get things up and out the door as fast as possible and start getting user feedback and iterate on that. And it's that that's an entire philosophy. It's an entire way of thinking that we were not taught in med school. And I have

taken on a lot of that and learned a lot of that because of my technical co-founders and other people that I've worked with. But I think I agree with you that in those early stages, that technology strategy, not just the coding, not just the what is this button going to do, but how does it support the business? Those are the two visionaries that I think you put together and you can really create something phenomenal clinically that

you're trying to do something innovative, something new, something that is not the way we do it now, well guess what? You're going to have to have tools to deliver.

David Lortscher (25:25.874)
completely agree.

Alison Curfman (25:27.63)
So what would you say? So you said that you didn't feel like the business co-founder was something you saw commonly. What about operators? mean, I guess you can always, when I first started working at a firm, I'm like, what's an operator? I don't know what they're talking about. But I think that sometimes there is a point at which you really need to...

Did you feel like you oversaw operations or you brought in people for your personal experience?

David Lortscher (25:59.024)
Yeah, I think that's important. think these days I would say you can wait longer because, you know, using AI, we can leverage ourselves further. And I think that for the longer we spend doing everything ourselves, the better the company is going to be created, like with a culture of like, you know, this, this like healthcare first patient first culture. but, know, I think it's, it's absolutely invaluable to bring in, you know, a really talented business generalist, probably not as a co-founder, but maybe as like a chief of staff, right? Maybe this has like someone who was a

you know, investment banker, Morgan Stanley or whatever, then they were chief of staff to another great startup that you respect. You pay them more than you think you should pay them, you hire them, and they're going to like be worth their weight in gold, right? Because they're going to help you put together the fundraising decks, they're going to help put together like, okay, like how do we handle the logistics of hiring this huge clinical team, managing them all? Like, you know, like they're going to help do the legwork of like making sure that the HR stuff is in order and all that stuff. So I think like a business generalist who's really, really sharp, like and who you very much respect is huge.

but maybe not as a co-founder right away.

Alison Curfman (26:59.98)
Yeah. So I guess the last question I have for you is for all the people, and I'm sure you get this question a lot, because I get this question a lot, that are like, it's just the beginning of an idea. They don't have any idea like how to jump in. They feel like they have a concept. They see that problem, that problem that they know uniquely how to solve.

What sort of advice would you give to people who aren't quite ready to jump in yet, but they want to know more?

David Lortscher (27:34.31)
Yeah, so two things. So part two of the book, Why Doctors Win that I wrote is literally me going through that exact process. So like I have the inkling of an idea and I run through two different case studies. One startup idea I had that I didn't end up running with and one that I had that I did end up running with and being CEO for 10 years. And I go through exactly how do I figure out whether this is worth, you know, this is worth pursuing. And then how do I do it? Do I do this part-time? Do I do it full-time? So, you know, I'd say that's, that's a resource that I

I'm biased, but I would recommend. the second thing is that, God, what was the second thing? So, you know, is I think testing it out, right? Like, you know, it's so easy to vibe code something these days and just like really like, you know, really just like, you know, see, see, see how it works and get into people's hands. You know, I think that's so easy to do these days and it's important.

Alison Curfman (28:26.986)
So I just want to take a second and share a little bit about where I've been trying to support physician founders. I went through a very structured process at a firm. I was in a venture studio and so they brought in a lot of resources around us. We had a lot of tools. We had a lot of people and the process was basically they were like, we will only fund this company when you can prove that it'll be worth a billion dollars. And it was like, what, what, a billion? Really? Like what?

And we had to build it on paper. So you do so much as a founder to create the model and, it's an economic model. It's a product roadmap. It's the messaging and the clear, you start with a one pager, grow it to a pitch, grow it to a, you know, a data room, but you are building those three core assets. You're building your forward looking financial model that is all of your assumptions, all of the things that you're assuming about the

the the revenue streams, the go-to-market strategy, you're figuring out your unit economics, you're figuring out a sensitivity analysis to say, which of these variables am I making assumptions about that if I was wrong, it would kill the business? So you're really creating what will then be your operational plan. It is going to be the thing that you're showing to investors and they're like, okay, not only do I follow the logic and I can see how this could become a billion dollar company,

But now I can see there's like a very clear execution plan. As soon as we give money to these founders, we know what they're going to do. They have a plan. And same with the product roadmap, like really clearly versioning out both your services and the tech product that goes along with it that really aligns with that same business plan. So you have a plan and a go-to-market strategy. And then, like you said, you have to get so much feedback. So I am running an incubator program this summer.

We have applications open now and we will be walking physicians through this entire process of how to build these assets to create leverage. it's never been a better time to be a solo founder. If you can have the tools to get some of this stuff together on your own, then you will be going into all of your conversations with a very, very great picture of what this business could look like. And you don't have to invest six figures of your own money into building tech.

Alison Curfman (30:50.85)
just to see if it would work out. This is something that you can actually invest your time and your thoughts into to really de-risk a concept. And you have to start by talking to patients, start by talking to other doctors, start by, like you said, vibe coding a prototype and saying, what would you think about this for your practice? Because you take every piece of feedback and then you come back to your model and you change your model, you change your product roadmap, you change your pitch. And you do that over and over until you get to the

harder conversations or the more challenging ones where you are talking to a payer or you are trying to sell it to someone. Can you pre-sell it? Would someone agree to buy it before you've even built it? Because if so, that's a really great market indicator. It makes it way easier to fundraise. And so all of these things are things that I think you have demonstrated incredibly both in your own journey and in your interviews of all these other doctors who have made incredible startups.

And in this book, which I think everyone should go to Amazon and buy why doctors win is really a great contribution to this space. But I just, I think that we need more physicians in this space. think that just because you haven't been exposed to the venture space does not mean that you don't have what it takes to be a founder. think David and I are both great examples of this. If you're someone that sees the potential in a problem,

and you're willing to go find the solution and you're willing to be humble and ask people for help and ask people to tell you where you're wrong in the hopes of creating something meaningful and impactful that can scale to serve hundreds of thousands or millions of patients, there is a space for you. So that's my spiel.

David Lortscher (32:40.58)
I love that. Couldn't agree more.

Alison Curfman (32:42.946)
Well, thank you so much again. Again, everyone should check out Why Doctors Win, David Lorscher, and we will put the link and his LinkedIn in the show notes. Thank you again, David, so much for joining me today.

David Lortscher (32:59.036)
Thanks so much, Allison. Great talking to you.

Alison Curfman (33:00.93)
Bye.