Dr Tom Meets: Conversations at the frontier of medicine
A new podcast series from Heidi Health, Dr Tom Meets sits down with the builders, thinkers and visionaries reshaping the future of medicine. Hosted by health tech journalist Christina Farr alongside Heidi Health Co-Founder Dr. Thomas Kelly MD, each episode goes deep with the people who are changing how care gets built and delivered.
Over the course of this series, we’re bringing you directly into the room with healthcare’s most fascinating minds. We’re talking to futurists, legendary venture capitalists, health equity pioneers and clinicians who left the safety of the hospital to build the next generation of medical technology.
We’ll explore everything from the ethical dilemmas of AI and the hype around longevity medicine, to the messy reality of fixing broken hospital incentives.
To kick things off in our inaugural episode, there was no better guest to set the tone than Rebecca Mitchell, Managing Partner at Scrub Capital.
Tom, Christina, and Rebecca cover what it really takes to leave a safe medical career, the reality of product-led growth in healthcare and why clinician-investors are essential in solving the industry’s problems.
Here are a few of the key takeaways from our first conversation:
Burning the boats for a startup
Medicine is historically hierarchical and famously secure: if you’re willing to put in the years of training, a stable, well-paying career is virtually guaranteed. Choosing to leave that behind for the chaotic, rejection-heavy world of early-stage startups requires a specific type of risk appetite (and a very specific type of personality!).
Tom “burned the boats” by letting his medical license expire, ensuring he had no backup plan and had to commit fully to his new career path. "If I reflect on my life, what am I going to regret most? I thought I was definitely going to regret not having started that company in AI," he explained.
But as Rebecca notes, these are the exact types of founders Scrub Capital seeks out. The truth is that while not every doctor makes a great entrepreneur, a clinician who has dedicated their life to medicine and also possesses the raw traits of a founder is a rare, powerful combination. The best ones don’t run away from medicine, they just want to build a way to drive a different scale of impact.
The great PLG debate in healthcare
Product-led growth (PLG) is standard in consumer software, but it has a messy history in the US healthcare system. So why is it that building a product doctors love often clashes with the rigid demands of enterprise buyers?
"I just think PLG doesn't work in the US at all," Tom noted (with the admission that Heidi's success with bottom-up adoption is something of an edge case). Often, the individual decision-maker in a hospital is entirely disconnected from the end-user.
As Rebecca pointed out, successful PLG in healthcare has to be highly strategic. If you can build something with exceptional user-centered design that clinicians absolutely refuse to give up, you can exert friendly pressure on enterprise clients to formalise the relationship. The failure happens when companies try to force a PLG motion onto a clunky, enterprise-first product.
Subscribe to episode 1 of Dr Tom Meets now
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Clinician-powered investing
For decades, finance and consulting types were given the keys to "fix" healthcare. The result has often been higher costs and more administrative bloat pushed onto physicians. Now, clinicians are stepping up to build the tools themselves.
Scrub Capital is entirely built around this shift. Instead of relying on a single top-down perspective, Scrub brings 30 to 60 clinicians from its community to evaluate investment opportunities. This acts as an ultimate filter. Clinicians on the front lines can spot a bad idea immediately, filtering out tools that misunderstand clinical workflows or pose actual compliance risks.
By giving doctors a seat at the cap table and a voice in product development, the industry is finally funding tools that solve actual, mission-critical problems for the people delivering care.
What’s coming up on Dr Tom Meets?
This first episode is just the beginning. Over the coming weeks, Dr Tom Meets will feature a lineup of healthcare's most fascinating minds.
We’ll be sitting down with legendary health system CEO turned venture capitalist Stephen Klasko, physician and futurist Daniel Kraft, MDCalc founders Graham Walker and Joe Haboushe, health equity pioneer Maxine Mackintosh and F Prime Capital’s Carl Byers.
We’re exploring everything from the reality of AI in the emergency room and the ethics of longevity medicine, to navigating broken healthcare incentives and the massive rise of the clinician entrepreneur.
Make sure you don't miss a single conversation. Subscribe to the full series now.
