Zach Lipton

And then he invited me out the next day to a happy hour and he kind of like rolled in thick.

So I'm like this like third year PhD student and he shows up for this happy hour in a strip mall in Pittsburgh with the CFO of UPMC, the CTO of UPMC, and with the executive vice president of UPMC Enterprises.

And it was that person, which is basically like this sort of like innovation arm of the hospital system.

That was Shiv Rao, who's my co-founder in a bridge.

You know, we actually did.

And this is a wild thing.

I think, you know, it sounds arrogant or something and you're expecting to hear like, no, we wandered in the desert for a while.

We did wander in the desert for a while, but like first we saw clearly what would be a bridge and then we wandered in the desert.

So Shiv has this incredible ability, despite like, you know, he's...

he's not technical at all himself, but he has this remarkable ability to like see the forest and to connect a lot of dots across a lot of places.

And so he already had landed in a couple places.

One was that like the burnout crisis in healthcare was ascendant.

Like this was something that

You could already see in 2000, January 2018, or when we were having this conversation, yeah, maybe around then, like this was maybe like had already risen to be like priority number four, but it was going to be priority number one.

Okay.

Like this was only getting worse.

Doctors were starting to leave the profession.

Med students were starting to say that they didn't even plan to practice.

And the other side was that I think Shiv and I had maybe from different angles, him as a investor on the sort of like venture side of the hospital system.

me as like an academic watching some of my peers try to start companies, was that we had watched a lot of companies try to get into the workflow and fail.