What I Look For When Mentoring Young Healthcare Founders

Last year, between April and August, I received over forty requests for mentorship — through S.H.I.F.T, through LinkedIn, through people who heard me speak at conferences and tracked me down afterward. Forty is not an enormous number by some standards, but it is more than I can meaningfully serve, and so I have to make choices.

I want to be transparent about how I make those choices — not because it will help everyone get selected, but because I think the framework reveals something important about what actually determines whether a founder succeeds in healthcare.

The majority of the applications I received led with the business model. Here is the platform, here is the market size, here is the problem statement, here is the competitive landscape, here are the financial projections. These were often well-constructed. Some were impressive in their detail and ambition.

But a handful — maybe five or six — began somewhere different. They began with a specific person, or a specific moment, that had made the problem feel urgent and personal. A sister who could not access prenatal care in a rural clinic. A community they grew up in where preventable deaths were simply normal. A healthcare worker they had watched burn out and leave the profession because the system gave her nothing to work with.

Those are the applications I printed out and read again. And those are the conversations that tended to go somewhere interesting.

Why I Do Not Start With the Business Plan

Let me be honest about something: the business plan matters. Eventually. If you are building a health venture that needs capital, needs to scale, needs to generate revenue, the fundamentals of the model will determine whether you survive. I am not romanticising the problem at the expense of the solution.

But here is what I have observed across the founders I have worked with over the years: business models are a lagging indicator of founder quality. The ones who succeed, almost without exception, do so through a combination of market insight, adaptability, and personal resilience — qualities that almost never show up in a deck.

And the ones who fail — the ones who make it through the first year on momentum and then stall — they often have excellent models and mediocre self-awareness. They have a clear picture of their product and a blurry picture of themselves. They can describe the market gap with precision and cannot describe what happens to them emotionally when the market ignores them for six months.

Healthcare is a particularly unforgiving context for that kind of blindspot. The sales cycle is long. The regulatory environment is complex and variable. The cultural dynamics around health-seeking behaviour are layered and sometimes counterintuitive. A founder who needs things to work according to plan — who does not have the psychological flexibility to hold uncertainty without becoming rigid or erratic — will eventually hit a wall they cannot get around.

The Quality I Actually Look For First

If I had to name one quality that, in my experience, most reliably predicts a founder's long-term success in healthcare, it would be this: the capacity to be curious about failure rather than defensive about it.

In early-stage conversations, I sometimes ask founders to tell me about a time when their current approach or assumption was proven wrong. Not a risk they had mitigated. Not a challenge they had overcome. Specifically: a time when they were wrong.

The responses split clearly into two categories. Some founders tell a story in which they were initially wrong, and then rapidly became right, and the moral of the story is how they figured it out. The failure is a setup for the triumph. It is not really an exploration of the failure at all.

Other founders tell stories in which they were wrong, stayed confused for a while, learned something that changed how they think, and still carry a residual uncertainty about whether they have it fully figured out. The failure is not resolved. It is integrated.

The second kind of story is much rarer. And it is the one I trust.

Healthcare is a field where you will be wrong, repeatedly, and in consequential ways. The community intervention that does not work the way the evidence base said it should. The clinical pathway that makes sense on paper and creates perverse incentives in practice. The patient population that does not behave the way the demand surveys predicted. If your relationship to being wrong is defensiveness — if your instinct is to protect your original position rather than update it — you will misread these signals and continue in the wrong direction long after the evidence is telling you to turn.

On the Problem of Passion

I want to gently complicate something that the startup culture has made almost unquestionable: the idea that passion is the primary driver of success.

Passion matters. I would not dispute that. The energy required to build a health venture through regulatory ambiguity, underfunded pilots, hostile procurement processes, and the occasional crisis of confidence — that energy has to come from somewhere real. You cannot fake it sustainably.

But I have mentored passionate founders who built nothing that lasted, and I have mentored less outwardly passionate founders who built things that are still running and growing years after I stopped being closely involved. The difference was not passion. It was systems thinking.

The founders who build things that outlast their own enthusiasm are the ones who are just as interested in the ecosystem around their solution as in the solution itself. They think about supply chains and regulatory pathways and community trust and workforce capacity and financing models. They understand that their product is not a solution — it is a component in a system, and the system has to work for the product to work.

Passion focused on the product, without systems thinking, tends to produce beautiful pilots that cannot scale. Passion combined with systems thinking is what builds something that actually changes the landscape.

What I Am Not Looking For

I want to be equally clear about this, because it is not said often enough.

I am not looking for founders who need me to validate them. I have mentored people in that position and it is not good for either of us. The mentee needs to be fundamentally confident in their own judgment — confident enough to sit with disagreement, to push back when they believe I am wrong, to use the mentorship as input rather than as permission.

I am not looking for people who want access to my network without doing the relational work that makes networks meaningful. A warm introduction from me only has value if you can sustain what comes after it. If you have not yet developed the listening, the reciprocity, and the follow-through that professional relationships require, the introduction will not do much for you.

And I am not looking for people who have already decided what they are going to do and want me to help them do it. I am looking for people who have a strong direction and a genuine openness to having it challenged, complicated, or refined. Mentorship is not coaching toward a predetermined goal. It is a thinking partnership. If you have already done the thinking and just need execution support, I am probably not the right person.

A Note to Everyone Who Has Applied

If you have applied for mentorship — through S.H.I.F.T or directly — and have not yet heard from me, I want to say something directly: the fact that I have not yet engaged does not reflect a judgment on the value of your work or the legitimacy of your ambition. It reflects my capacity constraints and the criteria I have described here.

What I would encourage, regardless of whether we connect formally, is this: find the people who are ten years ahead of you on the path you are walking, and invest in those relationships without expecting anything in return. Be genuinely useful to them. Show up to the conversations they are having, in whatever form you can. Ask questions that demonstrate you have done serious thinking. Be honest about what you do not know.

That approach — patient, curious, genuinely oriented toward learning rather than extraction — is the thing that has opened more doors for the people I most respect than any particular credential or pitch deck ever did.

And if we do eventually get the chance to work together, that is the version of you I am most looking forward to meeting.