A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:01:57 · Pablo Srugo, Wardah Inam
[00:01:57] S1: What were you doing? Just tell me a bit more about the last startup. You’re doing biomedical imaging. Just tell me more about what that is. [00:02:02] S0: We’re working on MRI data, making that faster to acquire, more quantitative, so that we can get focused on more preventive care and being able to catch disease faster so you don’t have to suffer from the disease. That was the thesis behind it, and we were building out MRI technology for that. [00:02:21] S1: Were you at the time thinking, I’m doing this to learn about startups so one day I can start my own? Or was that not really a thought in your mind? [00:02:29] S0: All through my PhD, I was building startups where some of them worked. Some of them did not work. I was commercializing anything I built. I think that was very inherent in what I was doing. Even in my postdoc, the project I was on was also a startup that was being built. I did join Q bio because it had a founder who was a successful founder. His last company was a firm, a successful company as well. It was about learning as well, but it was also I fell in love with the mission of the company. I didn’t want to join the company. I got introduced to the founder and he convinced me that it was an amazing opportunity and to really have an impact. That’s why I joined. [00:03:12] S1: You had this itch to maybe start something. You’d already started a few things in the past. Then you have this experience with a few dentists. Can you expand on that? You were sharing that story with me earlier.
00:03:12 · Pablo Srugo, Wardah Inam
[00:03:12] S1: You had this itch to maybe start something. You’d already started a few things in the past. Then you have this experience with a few dentists. Can you expand on that? You were sharing that story with me earlier. [00:03:22] S0: My personal experience was that I moved locations, so I changed my dentist when I went from one neighborhood to another neighborhood. When I changed my dentist, the new dentist gave me a treatment plan, which was very different than I had received before. I was surprised at the fact that why there was this much discrepancy. At that time, I asked the dentist to provide me with the x-rays. I started reading more about dental x-rays, dental one-on-one. [00:03:46] S1: You’re chasing what at this point? You’re literally trying to understand your treatment plan, or you’re already thinking maybe there’s some sort of – because you know about imaging? [00:03:55] S0: I’m just trying to understand my treatment plan and it just didn’t make sense to me. There was something off. For me, it’s one of those things. I was just trying to understand how important was it, why was there this discrepancy, the fact that I didn’t know anything, what was important to me as well. I started just reading up online, et cetera. Then I shared my x-rays with other dentists as well and I got different opinions. That what didn’t sit well with me, where it felt more of an art rather than a science. There has to be one truth. What is it?
00:03:55 · Wardah Inam, Pablo Srugo
[00:03:55] S0: I’m just trying to understand my treatment plan and it just didn’t make sense to me. There was something off. For me, it’s one of those things. I was just trying to understand how important was it, why was there this discrepancy, the fact that I didn’t know anything, what was important to me as well. I started just reading up online, et cetera. Then I shared my x-rays with other dentists as well and I got different opinions. That what didn’t sit well with me, where it felt more of an art rather than a science. There has to be one truth. What is it? [00:04:27] S1: This is on your free time. You’re working full-time. You’re doing what you’re doing. Then in evenings and weekends, this is your passion project? [00:04:35] S0: Yeah, and it didn’t start as a project as well. I started getting more into it, and then it got to a point where I said, okay, I’m spending more time on this than I’m spending on my day job. Anything I do, I do it fully in. [00:04:47] S1: Maybe let’s tangent on that a little bit because work-life balance gets a lot of attention, let’s say these days, but it doesn’t really fit, does it, with the zero to one? You talk about obsession and it’s a trait you see I think in a lot of successful founders. You think that’s a must have, you need to be obsessed to make things happen in those early days?
00:05:05 · Wardah Inam
[00:05:05] S0: I think one is about my personality as well, where I’ve found that for me, I will not be happy if I force myself to do the 9 to 5. That’s not just me. It’s one of those things that is believe that’s better, but the person I am, I really enjoy the things I do. Telling me not to do that is you’re taking that joy away from me. It’s not the positive. For me, that balance is different as well, and be having the freedom to work on things that are exciting, et cetera, that I want to work on and solve difficult problems. That’s what gets me excited. To your point of whether it’s necessary, I think everybody is different just in general, but I don’t think there is any shortcut to hard work. I think hard work is real and it actually gives you an edge. All my life, it’s something that I’ve believed in very heavily, and it’s something that it might – again, there might be people. The people I know who’ve been successful, whether they were professors doing their thing, these were some of the smartest people. I don’t think they needed to work the way they were working, but there were some of the hardest people at the highest level of their career that they could be. Nobody was telling them to work this hard, but that’s I think was a need to them. I think similarly in startups as well, I don’t know and there might be. I don’t know any founder that I admire that is not putting in their all. It is hard. It’s not other easy things to do. But if you’re solving a very hard problem, there might be that you got very lucky and there’s PMF from the beginning, and it could work out. I’m not saying it has to be always true, but I think you do absolutely increase your chances of success if you are putting in everything.
00:06:56 · Pablo Srugo, Wardah Inam
[00:06:56] S1: I think that’s true. It’s a competitive landscape and it’s really not like there’s skill, and then there’s hard work, and there’s going to be people that do both. Obviously, if you’re not one of those people, your odds of success are probably lower than somebody that’s potentially competing with you and is equally skillful, but also just putting in a lot more work. There’s balances all these things. [00:07:14] S0: Pablo, I feel especially in the beginning, it’s all about learning. Again, there are no shortcuts to learning as well. You need to learn and you need to put yourself in different experiences. You need to understand different viewpoints. You need to understand your customers, and you have to have conversations. That’s just time that it takes to learn everything new. The faster you learn, the faster you execute, the faster you can make progress as well and learn from the mistakes, because everybody’s going to make mistakes. I think it’s almost inherit to – again, you could get very lucky with everything just working, but most things just don’t work. If they were that easy, then it would have been done before. [00:07:57] S1: Back to the storyline, you’re obsessed about dentistry. You’ve unlocked some potential, let’s say problems, which is that it’s more art than science. But do you have an actual startup idea at this point when you start thinking about, okay, maybe I need to get out of my day job because I’m just spending so much time over here?
00:08:15 · Wardah Inam
[00:08:15] S0: This is one I don’t recommend, which is I did not. I had a thesis, and my thesis was that if I did not do any – just to give you a sense. When I was understanding the field more, what I realized was that there was a challenge in terms of how dental data was being analyzed, how diagnosis was happening. The way the industry was with private equity entrance into the space, say 10, 15 years ago, with a lot of money coming into the space with consolidation happening, and not having ways of measuring clinical quality. There were ways of measuring financial performance. There was no way of measuring clinical quality in dental practices. I felt that if we did not do anything about it, we would head in a very wrong direction. This was the time that dental service organizations with this consolidation that was happening, I think everybody realized this was the future. This was going to continue. Earlier, there was a lot of resistance to the consolidation that was happening. But then I think at the time that I started looking into it, I think people started realizing, because of the economics, this is going to happen more and more. If this is the trend that we’re going to go on, these groups do need a way to measure clinical quality. If they cannot measure clinical performance and clinical quality, they cannot improve it. That’s where Overjet started, or at least the idea of Overjet started to form in my head. It was almost I had to do something about it, so I quit my job and started shadowing dentists. There was not a name for it. There was no formation that happened at that time. It was literally for me to understand more of the space, and I had to go and actually see what was happening in dental practices.