Are you able to just like briefly summarize for people what it was that your friend told you at first? These are the pieces of business knowledge that you need to have just to get going.

Yeah.

So, you know, there's this famous investor called Ben Horowitz.

He started a VC firm called Andreessen Horowitz.

And he said in a lecture back in 2009 that you need two things to have a successful business.

One is you need a transformational product, right? So something that is truly going to make some part of the world much, much better for people.

It can't just be like 10% better, right? It has to be transformatively better, 50% better, five times better, something like that.

I mean, anybody experiencing it from the inside.

Maybe walk me through, like, how do you think about branding and testing which brands resonate with potential customers? Any tips on that?

Yeah, I mean, the funny thing was, is at the time, I thought I was giving the name pocketderm a lot of thought, even though it ended up being a really dumb name.

And, you know, I like spent a lot of time thinking about it, like spitballing with lots of people, making focus groups, like with my friends and like informal focus groups, of course.

And they're all like, yeah, totally, that makes sense, like a dermatologist in your pocket.

But the thing about being a physician going to business is there's a lot of things at the beginning that you think you're doing right.

You're like, yeah, I know that having a name is important, a good name is important, and I know that good marketing is important, but you just don't know what that means.

So for me, I had to gradually learn what that meant.

And I think for you, your next phase was maybe, was it then that you were considering writing a book or was it a different time?

Where, where did that come from? Has that been a theory for a long time for you?

I didn't even start thinking about it at all until I, I spent my 10 years as CEO of the company I co-founded, and then stepped back to board chair, and, and then finally had a second to think about anything outside of the business.

What I started noticing was that, you know, many of the companies founded by colleagues I knew or the companies that had succeeded in the healthcare space seemed to have physician founders, and that, that felt funny to me 'cause when I was trying to raise my first round of VC funding for the company, you know, like, like, tons of people you could tell were like, "Uh," you know, like, "There's no way you're gonna keep being CEO of this company long term," right? Like [laughs], "We hopefully are gonna do this for six months, find someone else to replace you." And it was a, a pretty widespread stereotype.

And so, um, I didn't think much of it at the time, aside from, like, I hope I can raise this money.

Um, but once I started noticing that, huh, like- If you look at all of the biggest healthcare companies founded recently, like the number one founded in the last forty years is Intuitive Surgical, right? Founded by a doctor.

The number two, Gilead, co-founded by a doctor.

The number four, number six, all the way down to fifty-one% of the top one hundred companies had a doctor founder.

What's your favorite story from the book?

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, like, "Oh, I'm gonna start a startup"? [chuckles]

It started with...

Which is I 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, "Oh, I'm an investor.

I was a consultant." But, but the people who I think are best positioned to spot these real needs are doctors and, and that's what happened to me, right? I was just in practice.

I had a, a spot to go to a, a fellowship in dermatopathology at UCLA the next year.

So I had no plans of founding a startup at the time.

But the need that I saw was that, um, there were so many patients who just could not access dermatology care, right? And but now it should be so efficient and easy for these people too, so why wasn't, why isn't this being solved? And when, when I looked at the 10 other or so teledermatology apps or, 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, and as, as all dermatologists know, these asynchronous consults are just like photos and text, right? And that's the best way to do, uh, telehealth and dermatology, 'cause like, you know, video just doesn't work for looking at people's skin.

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, and find success.