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About AI in Healthcare with Pickle
How can healthcare professionals transition from clinical practice to successful entrepreneurship? We chat with Jonathon Lee, a physical therapist (PT) who co-founded Pickle, an AI-powered job search platform for clinicians. Jonathon Lee began his career as a PT with aspirations of working with professional athletes. However, when he took over the care of a 90-year-old man whose simple goal was to lift his grandkids, Jonathon realized the profound impact he could have on underserved communities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he was inspired by the efforts of Oxford and AstraZeneca in developing a COVID-19 vaccine. This motivated him to apply to the University of Oxford’s business school, despite having no prior experience in business, where he immersed himself in the world of startups and innovation.
One of Jonathon’s significant contributions to the healthcare tech space is the creation of Pickle, an AI-powered job search platform designed to help clinicians find roles that align with their skills and interests. By leveraging AI, Pickle filters job listings based on a clinician’s medical background and career preferences, providing concise company summaries to make the job search process more efficient and transparent. This platform also fosters a collaborative community where experienced clinicians share insights and resources to support their peers.
Building a startup from the ground up is fraught with challenges. In this episode, you will hear about Jonathon’s journey through healthtech, medtech, pharma, and startups. And you will learn valuable insights into the critical steps necessary for launching a startup, from developing a network of supportive peers to acquiring essential non-clinical skills. According to Jonathon, a successful startup team should include a hustler, a hacker, and a designer. The hustler is the optimist who finds ways to solve problems and keep the company afloat, the hacker creates infrastructure from scratch, and the designer ensures the product meets customer needs.
The global healthcare workforce crisis requires innovative solutions, and platforms like Pickle play a crucial role in empowering clinicians to explore diverse career opportunities. Jonathon advocates for the inclusion of risk-seeking, innovative clinicians in efforts to address workforce shortages, emphasizing that AI will not replace clinicians but rather enhance their capabilities. Join us and find the inspiration you need for your own entrepreneurial journey in the healthcare industry.
Resources
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Transcript of AI in Healthcare with Pickle
Intro 00:01
Welcome to the Rehab Rebels podcast. Are you a rehab professional ready to transition to an alternative career? Hear inspiring stories from others just like you and learn the best ways to bridge your career gap. This podcast has you covered. Now here’s your host, doctor of physical therapy and podcaster, Tanner Welsh.
Tanner Welsch 00:21
Welcome back to another episode of Rehab Rebels. Welcome back to another episode of Rehab Rebels. For this episode, the biggest thing we can learn is that the journey of a rehab professional, particularly in the context of global challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic, can lead to profound insights about the limitations and opportunities within the healthcare system. Transitioning from clinical practice to entrepreneurship isn’t just about personal fulfillment. It’s about leveraging clinical expertise to address systemic issues and drive meaningful change at scale. Our guest today is Jonathon Lee. He’s a physical therapist and co-founder of Pickle, whose mission is to help clinicians find jobs they love in order to help build careers they love. He holds an MBA from the University of Oxford and completed his residency and fellowship in Houston, Texas. Welcome to the show, Jon.
Jonathon Lee 01:16
Thanks for having me Super excited.
Tanner Welsch 01:20
Absolutely Me too. Me too. There’s so many places to begin with you and so many questions. But let’s start from the story behind the first sense of awareness that things maybe weren’t quite right for you in the traditional rehab setting. What the reasons were? What the story was behind your shift outside of the traditional clinical patient care model.
Jonathon Lee 01:40
Absolutely. And, first off, I think this idea of the Rehab Rebel podcast is really timely. I think, whether you’re looking to change the landscape or your own career, or improve patient care in your own personal way, this idea of understanding that ways that we’re working right now could be done a little bit better. As for me, I’ve actually made four or five pivots in my career at this point, and I’ve been out of PT school for about 11 years at this point, I think, so it’s definitely been a crazy journey. Right now, I’m one of the co-founders of Pickle, and we’ve built an AI-powered job search for healthcare where you can instantly learn about new roles and industries across the healthcare ecosystem, such as health tech, med tech, biotech, et cetera. And not only can you learn about new roles and industries across the healthcare ecosystem, such as health tech, med tech, biotech, et cetera. And not only can you learn about these companies and roles, but we match each company, role and industry to your background. So, for example, if you’re a physical therapist, you automatically match with digital musculoskeletal care companies like Hinge and Sward and things like that. Or, let’s say, you’re a pharmacist, then PBM pharmaceutical benefits management companies pop up, or other pharma tech companies like Irene, and we built this because I think clinicians are looking for a way to expand their impact post-COVID, but a lot of times the information that they are receiving is either piecemeal or not easily accessible, and so we built an AI for healthcare for clinicians, specifically to be part of that change and understand what’s going on around them, give them real data so they can make the best choice for themselves, with the bonus of being able to apply for jobs quickly and not get ghosted. That’s what I’m doing now. But in terms of how I got here, it’s a very circuitous story and I’d like to caveat this in saying sometimes, when people reach out, the journey can seem linear, but I promise you it’s very, very not, and sometimes just in the right place in the right time. But you make your own luck by putting yourself in those positions to be vulnerable and to grow and to learn and to be rebellious, I guess.
03:47
So you know, like most teenage boys, I wanted to be a sports athlete and I wanted to be a sports therapist. So I went the whole residency and fellowship route after PT school down in Texas, I was at Houston Methodist. I did my fellowship with Toko Nguyen. He’s in PT. I think he’s the president of the sports section of AOMT right now. After I finished that, I moved up to Portland Oregon and while I was in that space I got a really amazing opportunity to work with athletes from NFL, from Major League Baseball, college, high school weekend warrior, et cetera, at this gigantic facility in the Nike ecosystem. I did that for a few years and it was great. I really enjoyed it.
04:27
But my first pivot out of that traditional patient care world happened when I decided to go from outpatient pro sports therapy into community health. I was working at this huge sports facility and one of my colleagues went on holiday and I took over her patient while she was gone. He was a 90 year old man and all he really wanted to do was pick up his grandkids. I taught him how to barbell that lift using lifts and things like that so I could pick up his grandkids. But it really stuck with me, so much so that I realized that I had spent the last five years at this point on this pro sports journey and maybe all the skills I was using weren’t helping the people who really needed it.
05:11
I come from a family of immigrants, very blue collar. We worked in restaurant jobs and dishwashers and make our way through America, and I really wanted to help those people. So I decided to leave that job and I went to go work at a community care clinic for a really large Medicaid hospital in Portland called Providence. This was driven in part by the ecosystem around 2018. It was a mental health crisis, it was the opioid crisis, it was the homeless crisis in Portland and my caseload shifted from pro sports to breast cancer, to homeless people, to oncology rehab, to autoimmune diseases for undocumented immigrants and the unsure people that really needed it right, and I loved it Did that for a few years. Along the way, I realized that there was a force multiplier through education, so we started a mini residency program. Keep in mind, we’re a Medicaid hospital, so we didn’t have the money to pay the APTA, so it wasn’t official, but I built a residency curriculum tests, took residents and taught them everything I needed from pro sports.
06:23
But then I think my next pivot usually happens, like most people, when you think everything’s going well, and that was COVID, and COVID was crazy. I mean, it was crazy for patients. I think people forget how crazy it was for clinicians. And then, in April 2020, I saw a ticker on CNN that said Oxford was creating the first COVID vaccine in partnership with AstraZeneca and had received $2 billion or pounds or some sort of extravagant amount of money that doesn’t make sense to clinicians.
06:57
Right, and I had this realization that my team and I, if we were lucky, we could get to 100 patients at a time in Portland, and I realized that every clinician starts healthcare with that white coat of right. How can I help my community? How can I do no harm? And in a city of less than a million people, in this global pandemic, seeing 100 people mean I had the max impact on my community. And this is important because it’s not about did you have impact? That is incredibly impactful. Right, you change the lives of people one at a time. But with a black swan event like COVID, how do you do more? Thinking back to that first day of PT school or nursing school or med school or whatever by these people who really need you?
07:41
Right, and so I applied to Oxford the next day, took me about a week to finish that application. The only program they had left was business school, and so I applied to business school without ever having opened Excel or PowerPoint or even thought about finance, aside from balancing my own checkbook. I wrote about what it was like to be a physical therapist in America, to have this dream of helping people get better physically, mentally, emotionally, to go through this rigorous training in school and residency and fellowship, to have all these student loans, yet sometimes work in a setting where you’re not being utilized to your best ability and to deal with people who are suffering or who have other social determinants of health, and to have to do this every 15 minutes and compartmentalize this and contextualize this, sometimes for people managers, directors, et cetera who had never had to watch somebody die. And so being a PT actually got me into Oxford. It’s amazing, and it wasn’t my story, it’s our story.
08:47
So I got my job, I sold my house, went overseas, went to business school and while I was there I decided I wanted to get into every corner of healthcare I could. So this is the next pivot, and the first pivot I made was into startups. I was the founder’s associate at this amazing startup that’s called Regmetrics, and the founder was a scientist at Oxford who was trying to find a way to accelerate production of life-saving medical devices, but she realized that a big bottleneck is actually regulatory pathways, so she built this amazing AI where founders could put their ideas in for their medical devices and it’ll tell you exactly what regulatory pathway you need to follow before you build it.
Tanner Welsch 09:27
How did you guys get in contact with each other and you realized you were a good fit? And what’s the backstory there?
Jonathon Lee 09:32
So this is not elegant at all, but when I went to business school I did not know. People took a year to prepare for business school. I did not know even what VC or private equity or management consulting was. I didn’t know any of it. So I literally went online and sent out maybe 10 to 20 messages a day on LinkedIn to people who had PT backgrounds, who were doing non-PT things. And one guy I got linked up to was a professor of robotics at Oxford who was a PT in the Netherlands and his wife was the founder of this company.
10:11
Very cool. Yeah, I just tried to find a way to build an environment where I could ask stupid questions safely, and I felt really safe in our PT network.
Tanner Welsch 10:19
I love that. The cold emails I heard that quite a bit.
Jonathon Lee 10:22
Yeah, and you’d be surprised. Our PT community is amazing. If you go and talk to people because you want to learn something, I mean, that’s the same way we became physical therapists. How did you become a PT? You heard it was a cool job. You reached out to a local PT, you shadowed them, etc. Right, the system is no different. That was great. Thanks for the backstory on that.
10:48
I’m working at Regmetrics and then at the same time I became a fancy word for an intern it’s called a venture consultant at this really cool company in Germany called DeepSpin, and so now I’m pivoting into medtech while I’m in regtech health tech and DeepSpin was building this amazing MRI that fit on a cart and it plugged into a three-pronged outlet and it costs one 1,000th the cost of a traditional MRI, and they had found a way to bring the power so low that you could take it mobile and you could plug it into things. And so they were a German company who was trying to figure out how to get to the US after they finished development and things like that. So my job was how do you navigate the US healthcare system? How do you build a go-to-market strategy that makes sense to investors and help key your product build so that you can bring this life-saving device and money-saving device to other countries. Right, and that sounds really fancy, but it’s stuff that every physical therapist or nurse or doctor knows about. Who is the decision maker in a hospital? What is the flow of patients from first visit to MRI prescription? Who reads MRIs Things that we know about that we don’t think we know, but we’re actually very, very deep experts in right, so that was cool. I was able to work with them for a few months until they went to fundraising. They were able to raise a bunch of money and then finally, in MBA programs, the way most programs work is at the end of the year you can do an internship if you choose.
12:10
I got super lucky through these cold outbound reach outs to other clinicians and got connected to the chief medical officer of Bayer Pharmaceuticals. I went to go work for the chief medical officer and his team on the digital transformation team. This was 10 months after leaving the clinic. 10 months is a very short time and I’m you sure you want me to work for you and he goes. Yeah, I just really have one thing for you to think about this summer and I want you to think about how do we update our digital transformation teams across the organization? How do we optimize this program that we have where we’re trying to integrate tech into healthcare? It’s a pretty ambiguous project. I don’t really know how it’s going to go, so just tell them you work for me and you can like talk to whoever you want. Okay, I’m learning from different departments and different projects and different personnel across the organization, globally, because no one says no to the chief medical officer, right?
12:57
And I got exposed to a lot of crazy things, and not just the drugs, but the tech side AR and VR, rehab models and equipment, genomic digital twins, high throughput data modeling and data lakes All this crazy stuff that we read on random articles online. It’s actually real. I learned a lot, finished up there, graduated and then we were still in the pandemic. So I spent the next two-ish years in management, consulting, slash biotech and I wanted to find a way to make more precision medicines for people who really needed it. I found a really amazing consulting firm in New York and London called Idea Pharma, and basically what happens is a bunch of big pharma companies will come to them with their molecules and Idea has to turn them into medicines and really this idea of taking a scientific breakthrough and turning it into the actual functional medicine that people can use and then build out all the clinical trial programs, build on all the different potential pathways, all the go-to-market, all the market entering to every country, because the UK versus France versus Germany versus the US is totally different. In a lot of ways it’s like building a plan of care with a lot of different layers to it. And so I did that for the next two and a half years until the pandemic was over.
14:17
But while that was happening, I also pivoted back into startups and VC funds and accelerators, because a ton of founders and a ton of accelerator managers and investors would reach out to me while I was working there and say, hey, I’m working on this idea, I’m trying to find X for Y, do you know of anybody or can you help me? And then on the other side, I would say like a thousand clinicians reached out to me just saying, hey, I’m working during COVID, I’m burnt out, I want to do more in terms of helping our communities and I’m not being used to the best of my ability at the hospital right now. How did you do what you do? How did you get there, can we chat? What would you do if you were me? And so this whole thing is swirling while I’m living in London, and so I had an idea, a British and a millennial hybrid idea.
15:08
What happens if you put these people who need each other, these investors and founders, and these clinicians who want to work at startups, if you just put them together? And what if you did it? In a way that was fun. So I started a pub night one summer and I put it on Reddit, and then the NHS went on strike and it absolutely exploded. The entire NHS in the UK went on strike Doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, et cetera together, which is very rare, because a lot of times we’re fighting with other professions for our own piece of the pot.
15:32
I bring my VC and my operator friends and my founder friends. I bring my clinician friends. I would just put them at a table and I would just listen and just see what they were talking about. The. And I would just listen and just see what they were talking about. The first thing that happened was that these clinicians thought that the companies didn’t want them. That was false. The second thing that happened was that these companies thought clinicians who could do more than just clinical care didn’t exist. So the challenge then becomes not do they not exist? Because that’s false. The challenge becomes actually they’re in different communities. So what happens if you just put them together? And this is the output A bunch of these companies hire these clinicians. A bunch of these companies then fundraised and a bunch of these companies then had their scientific and healthcare breakthroughs adopted by the NHS, and so this all happened.
16:21
Then COVID ended and I quit my consulting job because I went in there wanting to help out during the pandemic. Pandemic was over and I started Pickle with the idea that if you can give clinicians the power and the freedom of data to understand how fast things are changing, will they be able to take control of the career process on their own and make the best decision for them, instead of outsourcing this to LinkedIn or other forms of support services that maybe don’t have your best interest in mind. In my mind, my assumption is absolutely. I mean, you’re telling me that you could do a code blue. You’re telling me that you can do gross anatomy, but you’re telling me that you can’t do Excel.
17:04
I think that’s ridiculous. That’s absolutely ridiculous. If you know how to do what you wanted to do and you know the people in there that are doing what you want to do and how they did it. Could you alter your own career while helping these other founders and investors who are building these crazy things to go reach more patients? And on the backside for these founders, healthcare is a super highly regulated industry. If you could connect them with actual healthcare experts with years of experience, could they build faster, and this is our hypothesis. We connect the two so that everyone wins.
Tanner Welsch 17:40
Jon, I love that. That’s brilliant. I have several questions for you. The first is defining what health tech, med tech, biotech is for those that don’t know. And then a follow-up question is Pickle. What can someone expect from Pickle when they’re looking for this? Match with what’s out there? What best aligns for them? What kind of information does Pickle need to help the clinician line up with the best possible career outcome?
Jonathon Lee 18:07
Oh, great questions. The way I like to think of it is that health tech, med tech, biotech, femtech all these buzzwords are tech-enabled children or cousins of healthcare. Health tech is mostly software-related enablement of healthcare. That could be a bunch of different ways. You could do it as infrastructure tech. Maybe I’m building something that can link an EMR to a scheduling software. Maybe you’re creating a digital health company where I’m using tech to enable telehealth services right. So health tech is tech-enabled healthcare delivery and optimization. Medtech is tech-enabled device development, optimization Basically something that you can see and touch and feel, where software is a bit more nebulous Anything where you’re using a device to optimize or fulfill a treatment objective.
19:01
Biotech is anything where you’re using biological sciences to solve a problem, and that problem can actually be beyond healthcare. For example, food science is actually part of biotech. But the easiest way I think about biotech is big pharma. You take these new compounds that could do something and you figure out could they help a certain disease or patient population, in what sequence, in what schedule, in what format, in what dosage, et cetera. And so biotechs in that industry are actually the smallest companies, whereas big pharma is the biggest companies. Does that make sense?
Tanner Welsch 19:40
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Thanks for the clarifications. I love that.
Jonathon Lee 19:43
Now, what can people expect from Pickle? That was the second question, and the short answer is we’ve started with the basics and we’re building out more. So we started this company in October of last year. It’s been about five months as of this, recording the way we’ve built this is very simple. Right now we’re invite only sign up for the wait list when you go in. It’s very simple. It’s your traditional search strings date, posted salary, et cetera.
20:14
But then we’ve built out a couple of really nifty AI features from scratch. The first AI feature is a best fit company match, and what this does is we’ve mapped the entire ecosystem of healthcare to a spine that’s based on different medical professions. So at the click of a button, you can decide. You can say I’m a physical therapist or I’m a nurse, or I’m an occupational therapist, and filter out the thousand jobs that we have currently specifically to the jobs and companies where physical therapy would be a powerful value add Things like medical devices, digital MSK, emr billing for physical therapy startups. Then the next AI feature that we’ve built out that’s really interesting is we’ve taken the next step and we’ve incorporated the clinical background to traditional startup hiring trees, so you can say I’m looking for a job that was posted within the last seven days, that’s paying at least $100,000, where a physical therapist who’s interested in operations would be a good fit at Boom. Very simple. What’s really important, though, it’s not really just about finding the jobs. It’s about understanding if you actually want to work for them.
21:23
Within each company, after you’ve done your filtering, we’ve actually done a couple of things. We’ve highlighted the mission, the wow factor, and how each company does what they do in one sentence. We’ve created a synopsis of every single company in 250 words or less, that tells you their place in the industry, their place in fundraising and then their place in the healthcare ecosystem, and we’ve cut out all the jargon. There’s no words like hyper growth. There’s no words like convertible debt equity none of that stuff. It’s simply simple and straightforward, and then you can apply directly through our portal no third-party job or anything like that, and so that’s where we started.
22:07
Currently, we’re building out a ton of other amazing features that get away from these base features that we’re rolling out over the next coming weeks and months Things like resume generators and resume critiques. How can I answer these interview questions? How can I go from product specialist to product manager to head of product if I’m a new graduate. And finally, the last thing about Pickle that I think is the absolute most important thing is that we’ve highlighted and partnered with hundreds of clinicians from around the world who are doing exceptional things Clinicians who have founded startups, who have become VPs at hospitals, clinicians who have become software developers and product managers, et cetera.
22:53
And these clinicians have reached out to us and written step-by-step guides on a million different things, such as getting a product, such as starting your startup, such as fundraising, from their perspective, and have included the resources that have helped them get to where they’ve gotten to. And who better to understand your perspective than someone who’s been through what you’ve been through? And this is what I’m most proud of. The clinical community has been so good to me when I was trying to figure out how I could change healthcare in my own little way, and now we have hundreds of clinicians from Asia, Australia, England, Germany, the US, Canada, Turkey doing the same thing, sharing their knowledge with the rest of us for free.
Tanner Welsch 23:34
Is there like a timeline for when the Pickle is going to have full futures available? Everything’s up and running and ready to go.
Jonathon Lee 23:43
Yeah, it’ll never be done. Never and, quite honestly, that’s the way it should be. Healthcare changes so rapidly and there are so many different types of clinicians and motivations and ways that you can make an impact that we can’t honestly say our job will ever be done, because our job will only be done when clinicians stop caring about how to change healthcare, which will never happen. In terms of opening up the waitlist, it’s actually live and we have a bunch of clinicians on our platform. We have a bunch of people on the waitlist that we’re still onboarding now over time, but I would anticipate in the next few months that we’ll probably get rid of the waitlists.
24:20
The challenge is that we had so many people clinicians sign up at first we actually broke our waitlist vendor, so now we’re scaling our backend systems to actually accept these thousands of clinicians into the platform. We’ve done most of that, but really the main point is building out these crazy tools is really important and we want to make sure that they work how you want them to work, while testing them, but not releasing them to everybody, right, because I think clinicians have been so disappointed myself included in some of the tools out there for us Making sure that things work under a small scale, and then ramping up the scale allows the things you don’t see, like back-end authorization bottlenecks don’t happen.
Tanner Welsch 25:05
Makes sense. So something I’ve been thinking about throughout this interview is you mentioned that there’s several people that reach out to you and basically, hey, this is where I’m at. I want to get to where you are, what would you recommend, what would you do? And there’s some mini transitions that I’m at. I want to get to where you are, what would you recommend, what would you do? And there’s some many transitions that I’m interested to dive deeper into to figure out how that happened, and one of those is this startup with Pickle.
25:26
The light bulb came on when you saw these clinicians coming together with the startups and these two groups of people actually mingling and there was, oh my God, this is brilliant. So one is what have you realized or what would you share with those that are interested in transitioning or doing something that you’ve done and or what you’ve noticed from a lot of people you’ve talked to. If you can give us some pointers on some themes or concepts that really applies to the majority of those individuals that you talk to, that would be helpful to share with everybody on the podcast.
Jonathon Lee 25:58
Absolutely. I can actually think of a couple of things, but I’ll keep it to a few. The first thing is you always start with people in your tribe who have done different things, because you need to build a fail-fast, fail-safe environment where you can ask questions that you may think are stupid, but actually the other person said, no, they’re not stupid, because I had them too. This would be your PT who’s a product manager? Or your nurse who did an MBA? Whoever has done kind of that hybrid scheme that you’re looking to use as a platform for your own journey. That’s where you start. Within that, there’s two types of people you need to find, and I need to credit my friend, Jules for this. Jules has a great podcast also on PT careers. Most people focus on mentors, but you also need to focus on finding a sparring partner, and a sparring partner is someone who’s in the same stage as you, who is also trying to do what you’re trying to do, because by having a sparring partner, it keeps you honest and you can exchange information with each other, as you’re both looking for mentors. But the next step is actually just as important. After that step, you need to go hard into the community that you know nothing about.
27:08
So let’s say that you’re actually in an MBA, you start with a PT and an MBA, but then you need to use that bridge to build networks with other founders who are not clinicians. And this is really scary because I think as clinicians we’re really comfortable with investing in our clinical careers but we’re a little scared to invest just as heavily into our non-clinical careers. But this is super important because there’s so many layers to this that we never learned in clinic. Things like what is a C-corp versus an S-corp versus an LLC, how do I allow an election 83B for my tax-deferred compensation for my equity.
27:37
These things are really important for helping bring your idea to life. And those are all just a bunch of jargon and other things which you’ll learn. But building this network of people who are not clinicians, who are experts or experienced in what you’re trying to get to, is really important to encapsulate that understanding. Encapsulate that understanding. But I would suggest that strategy Find your mentor and your sparring partner in that hybrid transition you’re trying to make and use that information to get to the next step, to find people that are hard on the other side to fill in the gaps you don’t know.
Tanner Welsch 28:12
I love that. Thanks for sharing so these many transitions. You had a consulting it was management biotech consulting position that you did for a couple of years, I believe and also with the Pickle, pick whichever you feel is best. Or if you want to share both, share both. But what was it like, let’s say, six months before you actually did either of those live? What was that like? What were those struggles like, getting that stuff off the ground and then give us a six month after then? What was your struggles and stuff then?
Jonathon Lee 28:43
Actually, it was a lot like taking your board exam. Six months before is like the week before your exam. You’re afraid of everything. You’re trying to do everything. You don’t know what the future is going to look like. There’s so much chaos and just that feeling of dread and worry. Six months after is actually like that week after your board exam, where you have that one or two week gap, depending on your profession, and waiting for your results to come back when.
29:08
Okay, well, I can’t really change it. Now I’ve accepted that it’s chaos and now I just need to see where it goes. That’s the best way I can put it. To give you an example, especially as a first-time founder, you have this idea of what you’re trying to do. Right, I want to help empower clinicians so that they can be inspired to go change healthcare in ways that I could never do.
29:29
But how do you do that? Do I research a bunch of stuff? Do I incorporate a company first? Do I try to raise money from investors? Do I try to learn how to code? Someone else is doing something similar. Should I stop? It’s very chaotic, right, and afterwards, six months later, a couple of transitions happen. I think that all clinicians have gone through. In a way, it’s like the Greek Stoics You’ve accepted that the world is chaos and all you can really control is your response to it. Startups will be crazy. There will always be things that come up that you have to deal with urgently, especially as a founder or early employee. Right, but I know that as long as I have my own ecosystem set, I’ve got my team, I’ve got my family, I’ve got, you know, my loved ones with me. Together, we can deal with whatever that comes up, right.
Tanner Welsch 30:16
I loved how you, six months before you, had all these questions that were racing through your mind where to start? Can we dive deeper into that and share a general framework for how you started putting something together to create a startup? I imagine there’s several people involved that are required to do this thing. Give us a general roadmap and maybe some challenges that you had to get this thing going for those that are looking to maybe also do a startup as well.
Jonathon Lee 30:41
Absolutely. I’m going to give a piece of unpopular advice that I have both given and received in my time as an accelerator, mentor, a PC advisor, etc. You can start building a company now as a solo founder, but that also does not mean you have to stay a solo founder. In general, the way I like to approach building a company in any industry is you’re looking for three main personalities on your team. It doesn’t mean you need three people, but you’re looking for three general personalities and I like to think of those personalities very simply. It’s a hustler, a hacker and a designer.
31:20
Your hustler is the one who, no matter how crazy it gets, is the optimist. They find ways to solve problems or they find ways to sell your product or they find ways to fundraise. That super optimist, energizer, bunny person just figures out a way to keep your company from dying. The hacker is your person that can create something out of absolutely nothing. This could be the person who makes your cards, if you’re doing a wedding invite. This could be your software developer, who can just make something out of nothing. So this is the infrastructure person. If you’re a hustler, it’s your financial person. And the last one is, I think, the most important. This is the designer. The designer is the person who, no matter what happens, is always thinking about the customer. Does this look right? This is how they would want to use it. Does this look right? This is how they would want to use it. Are we positioning ourselves to show these customers or users that we want to help them with what they’re really struggling with? Because no one else knows what they’re struggling with except as well as we do. That person is their operations person. They would handle positioning, infrastructure, UI, UX, customer research, et cetera. So, hacker, hustler, designer that’s the three personalities. Now, what’s absolutely fascinating is you don’t have to be all three, but you should find out which one you identify with most, with most within yourself, what that person’s strengths are, and then use that as you’re doing your other resource, going through your networks, your hybrid networks, and then your non-familiar networks.
33:00
Then add your co-founders to those other two. A founder is someone who’s there from day one, inception. A co-founder can be someone who comes on later. They’re used interchangeably, but they’re actually slightly different from a definitions perspective.
33:16
I’m really lucky because I have just a team. That is amazing, like I would do anything for them and, quite honestly, most people see me and think this is my company. It’s not. It’s our company and we work together, and that’s the only reason why we’re able to take all these crazy concepts and make them actually work, because I could do this on my own. You keep thinking about this idea and then you meet other people and you talk to them about it who fulfill one of the other two personas, and, if it works, you bring them on and you keep building like that. So start your company now in terms of thinking about it, based on which of the three profiles that you align most strongly with. Learn about it, write things down, research it, but then always be looking for those other personalities, either if you build it yourself or you find someone you trust who can do one of those things Hacker, hustler, designer.
Tanner Welsch 34:08
I love that, Jon. Thank you so much for the insights, man. That’s great. We’ll have to bring it to a close. Is there anything else that you’d like to share with rehab professionals and better struggling, I think, working in the traditional model and interested in, and or looking for, something different?
Jonathon Lee 34:24
Yes, there’s one thing that I really want to talk about. This is separate from Pickle. I want to talk about the global health care workforce crisis. Right now, a lot of people get the mistaken idea that I’m trying to get clinicians to leave clinic. My goal is how do we take this information that’s traditionally been siloed away from clinicians and give it to you for free, so you can make the best choice for yourself, your family, which actually, a lot of time, is a clinical career, but that doesn’t change the fact that you should have this information to make the best decision. Specifically, though, people get this idea that I’m trying to take clinicians out of healthcare, out of clinical care, and I think that’s ridiculous for three main reasons. The first reason is just purely DEI diversity, equity and inclusion. If there is a global workforce shortage of clinicians, why are you going to excommunicate any segment of them, especially the risks-seeking, innovative ones, who may be even just thinking about what a different career path could look like? There’s not enough of us already, and you’re going to excommunicate someone for asking a question that, quite honestly, could be asked in any other industry. I don’t think that’s right from a human or moral perspective. I don’t think that’s right from a human or moral perspective. The second is we are entering this entire new generation of workers. By 2030, two-thirds of all clinicians will be Gen Z or young millennials, and what COVID has shown us is that this is the boomerang generation. Gone are the days where our parents or elders would work at one company for the rest of their lives. This new generation of workers is looking to be challenged and will seek out different employers to find them and will come back to the ones that are really good to them. So right now, in terms of startups, all the first movers are actually in the 2010s, during the boom cycle of tech. But now our research actually shows that a bunch of these people, these clinicians who have gone into startups, are actually coming back to healthcare. Can you imagine the amount of information and insights and knowledge that these clinicians have gleaned in clinical care and then in startups that they’re going to bring back now to slower moving legacy healthcare players? This is a new generation of workers who, just because they leave, research shows they’re actually more likely to come back. Cool.
36:44
And the third reason why I think this idea of taking clinicians out of clinical care is ridiculous is just the data. When I was in the UK, I had the opportunity to meet this amazing surgeon named Dr Tony Young. Tony Young is a urologist in the UK’s NHS who started a program 10 years ago called the Clinical Entrepreneur Program. What his hypothesis was if we can stimulate clinicians and teach them about non-clinical things, can they take their vast clinical insight and use it to fix these clinical problems? Basically, it’s a mini MBA for clinicians in the NHS that’s jointly run by the NHS and East Anglia University. It’s been doing it for 10 years, pledging a ton of data, and the data is astounding.
37:32
First off, if you think about it, every clinician who applies to this program is thinking about leaving the NHS. A full one-third of applicants over the last 10 years and participants have stayed in the NHS because of the clinical entrepreneurship program. Name to me a single workforce program in the US healthcare system that cuts attrition by a third. I can’t think of a single one. A lot of these clinicians the two-thirds that ended up leaving actually started companies or worked for companies that they were then able to have their technology adopted by the NHS. So, if you think about it, this idea that giving clinicians information about what their passions and career growth can align with. It’s totally different than this idea of taking clinicians out of healthcare. But what’s going to happen is AI will never replace clinicians. Clinicians who use and understand data replace the ones that don’t.
Tanner Welsch 38:25
Jon, I love that man. We’re going to have to have a hard stop. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your knowledge and experience, so really appreciate you and hope we have you on again and see you around. So thank you.
Jonathon Lee 38:37
Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Sorry for rambling a little bit. Let me know if you need anything. Thanks for being interested in Pickle and I can’t wait for you to see it. I think you’re going to love it.
Tanner Welsch 38:46
Thanks, Jon. I’m excited too to see all it has to bring and offer everybody. So, yeah, looking forward to it. Take care.
Outro 38:53
Thank you for listening to the Rehab Rebels podcast. If this podcast was useful, make sure to hit that subscribe button and leave a review. For more information about transitioning to alternative careers, head to rehabrebels.org or follow us on Instagram at Rehab Rebels podcast. We’ll see you next time.
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