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Key Takeaways Being early and right is necessary, but not sufficient. You also have to be willing to endure the distance between vision and market readiness.
If I were starting over today, I would focus earlier on distribution and adoption rather than just building the product. And don’t build for the intermediaries — build for the people the system is supposed to serve.
Establishing credibility early is not a soft goal; it compounds. The founders who invest in trust from the beginning create moats that features can’t replicate.
The science in AI is ahead of the market, the infrastructure is being built and the founders who act now, before it becomes obvious, will define what the industry looks like in 20 years.
My father was the first OB-GYN in a small town in South Georgia. He knew his patients personally, delivered their children and became a trusted part of their lives. He carried the full weight of being the only specialist in a community that depended on him — and ultimately paid the price, dying of a heart attack at 38.
That image shaped everything about how I think about building. I followed him into medicine, became an OB-GYN myself and spent years developing advanced skills in robotic surgery, pelvic reconstruction and operative obstetrics. I was trained to solve difficult clinical problems.
But over time, I realized the biggest problems in healthcare weren’t clinical. They were systemic. And solving systemic problems required stepping outside the system entirely — which is how I ended up leaving a profession I loved to become a founder.
It’s a path that has taught me principles about timing, distribution, trust and who you’re actually building for. Those principles apply well beyond healthcare to any founder trying to reshape a complex, entrenched industry.
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