How Being a Doctor Made Me a Better Founder | Hacker News Reader

How Being a Doctor Made Me a Better Founder

inc.com

28 pointsjakek12 comments

It has been my experience that doctors make horrible businessmen. I think it is the medical school training that encourages over confidence in their abilities, even outside their domain, and a dangerous reluctance or inability to listen to outsiders or experts of lower social status. Perhaps this guy is the exception but I don't think it was the doctor training so much but the fact that high intelligence is general can quickly be applied to any area.

Not sure whether docs generally make better, same or worse businessmen, but my experience with medical training taught me to question everything rather than to encourage overconfidence. There's certainly value in artificial confidence in medicine as it applies to most patients, who aren't knowledgeable or alert enough to distill information like you may be able to.

> medical training taught me to question everything...

Certainly this has value but the ability to question everything in an intelligent way is not generalizable. By that I mean that the training in med school includes a huge context of medical knowledge not just this method. The danger and error that I see is that many docs think the method is sufficient without out the context.

> There's certainly value in artificial confidence in medicine as it applies to most patients...

I get it and understand the need. However, in my experience the eventual dupe of the con is not the patient but the doc. I have seen it often enough that it is my default assumption though I have met some good people who happen to be doctors who have not fallen into that trap.

Medicine and business are two very different areas with aspects of each that may even seem polar opposite. As a physician, you are taught and trained to approach problems in a very calculating and methodical manner, to avoid risk as much as possible for fear of hurting the patient. Advancing a career in medicine is more academic than anything. You study, take tests, pass them, move up into the next hierarchical structure, repeat. There is always a clearly defined path. You'll find many doctors eventually view other aspects of their lives in a similar way, avoiding risky investments or endeavors that do not provide a clear, concrete, measurable return. Business can often times require you act more on blind faith, to build relationships with others to advance your career often without any hard, demonstrable evidence proving you know what you claim. Marketing, sales, etc, are nowhere nearly as concrete as medicine. You can't measure conversions as well as you can white blood cell count. Two different mindsets and outlooks on life.

Great article.

What I have come to appreciate more and more about physicians is their on-the-fly algorithmic decision-making ability whereby the doctor must account for factors that go well beyond pathophysiology and extend into statistics, social/cultural conventions, benefits/costs analyses, financial situations (insurance coverage, or lack thereof), and more. To gather, categorize, rank, simplify and prioritize data is an incredibly valuable skillset no matter your profession, particularly for an entrepreneur whose roles can vary greatly hour-to-hour.

Spot on. I work in medical informatics and my brother is a doctor. Doctors have a unique way of distilling information. My brother likes to say "does it change management?" aka, is a piece of information important enough to change outcome.

The problem I have with virtually all medical information related startups revolves around protected health information (PHI). How does a startup get it? How does a startup attain a level of credibility, both financially and technically, where an organization that has access to a patient population - like a physicians group, hospital, etc. - get the opportunity to prove their product. Unless you make your case directly to the patient and get them to give you their data, any sizeable organization is going to be extremely reticent to part with their PHI for political, legal and, of course, general technical ineptitude reasons. Not a trivial problem, I can assure you.

I'm also a physician and my hospital uses a similar product that I wrote with symfony. It's rough but we've been using for three years now. If you are interested in helping me take it to the next step or you need a doctor as part of your project, just contact me. carotids at g mail

Very interesting article. Just wish it explained what medisas actually does. Also slightly amused that they really seem to stick to the priotizing by having a website that's simple and not minding that it's slightly broken: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8gk8om9gnsujhte/Screenshot%202014-...

Edit: Huh, looks like they don't even have a product yet.

Unfortunately we've had to prioritise building product and taking care of our customers - the corporate site is a lower priority item ;)

But we're hiring, so anyone who desperately wants to fix the website should send us an email.

I don't see it as something unfortunate, just a consequent application of your other conclusions. :)

The biggest takeaway is that medical troubleshooting methodology carries over to running a startup? Someone clearly needed some press...

I was expecting to open this article and read the word "MONEY" in big bold font.

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