Clinicians in Venture: Dr. Timothy Martens & Alex Tang on Vaark Ventures, AI Hype, and Building Fundable Healthcare Startups

Yeah, so that's a great question.

When I first started doing this right around the time that I partnered up with Alex, my deepest experience was in medical devices, complex biologics, pharma, kind of traditional, more med tech.

I had hands-on experience building some of the software stuff, but that was newer, 16 forward, a little bit of data creation and experience, but I was never a programmer or like a technical guy.

So I had to teach myself that aspect of things.

I had the most confidence in traditional med tech.

Unfortunately, even at the pre-seed and seed level, those checks and rounds get huge quickly.

So it's hard to play in pharma and med tech when they're trying to raise $20 million and you're coming at them with, well,

maybe we have a

hundred

thousand dollars.

Whereas

Software stuff starts up very small.

It scales very quickly.

There's a real opportunity to get in with valuations under 10 million and still get a decent ownership percentage.

At the same time, help the companies with their strategy, with their growth and fill in gaps.

Almost invariably, every team you come across is going to have some gap.

They might be clinicians, physicians with a great product, but no understanding of the business side, little experience on the regulatory

front.

Or on the flip side, it might be a purely technical team chasing features on a product, but that doesn't have the clinical insight into how that product would need to be applied and how it has to integrate with clinical workflows if it's ever going to succeed.

The thesis for me has morphed and will continue to morph as we gain more experience.

But the most succinct way I can say it right now is clinical medicine in general is full of pain.

Paying for the patients, paying for the providers, paying for the payers, incentives are so misaligned.

And you can see it with physician burnout, with patient dissatisfaction, with the overall distrust right now.

It's in bad shape.

So if you come to us with any solution that addresses a real pain point, I don't care if it's a diagnostic or a therapeutic looking to improve things for patients, if it's a back office revenue cycle looking to improve things for the providers.

Yeah, so that's a great question.

When I first started doing this right around the time that I partnered up with Alex, my deepest experience was in medical devices, complex biologics, pharma, kind of traditional, more med tech.

I had hands-on experience building some of the software stuff, but that was newer, 16 forward, a little bit of data creation and experience, but I was never a programmer or like a technical guy.

So I had to teach myself that aspect of things.

I had the most confidence in traditional med tech.

Unfortunately, even at the pre-seed and seed level, those checks and rounds get huge quickly.

So it's hard to play in pharma and med tech when they're trying to raise $20 million and you're coming at them with, well,

maybe we have a

hundred

thousand dollars.

Whereas

Software stuff starts up very small.

It scales very quickly.

There's a real opportunity to get in with valuations under 10 million and still get a decent ownership percentage.

At the same time, help the companies with their strategy, with their growth and fill in gaps.

Almost invariably, every team you come across is going to have some gap.

They might be clinicians, physicians with a great product, but no understanding of the business side, little experience on the regulatory

front.

Or on the flip side, it might be a purely technical team chasing features on a product, but that doesn't have the clinical insight into how that product would need to be applied and how it has to integrate with clinical workflows if it's ever going to succeed.

The thesis for me has morphed and will continue to morph as we gain more experience.

But the most succinct way I can say it right now is clinical medicine in general is full of pain.

Paying for the patients, paying for the providers, paying for the payers, incentives are so misaligned.

And you can see it with physician burnout, with patient dissatisfaction, with the overall distrust right now.

It's in bad shape.

So if you come to us with any solution that addresses a real pain point, I don't care if it's a diagnostic or a therapeutic looking to improve things for patients, if it's a back office revenue cycle looking to improve things for the providers.