Why Your Engineering Team's Size Doesn't Matter Anymore w/ Michael Kopko | Episode 207

Speaker A: Yeah, and I think great engineers, and they'll be a little bit different maybe than what a great engineer was 10 or 20 years ago. But great engineers will do even better, will be compensated even more, will be more productive, and we'll be able to develop and build things fast. You're seeing this with a lot more companies hitting revenue rates with smaller talent bases than we've ever seen before. It's incredible. I mean the number of people at Anthropic and OpenAI would shock you based on the revenues. I was shocked, you know, and this was like, I'm probably on a year old data now, but there were like a thousand people and you're approaching 10 billion in revenue. I mean it's just wild. So we're changing human productivity.

Speaker B: Welcome to Software Leaders Uncensored. I'm Steve Taplin and every episode I get to sit down with technology engineering leaders. Founders, CEOs, CTOs talk about what's working and what's breaking inside tech organizations today. And after over 200 episodes, we continuously uh, see patterns forming. And that's what this show is all about, is analyzing those patterns and making them available for our listeners. We, we recently published our ah, report why Software Projects Fail. This was based on research from the first 195 episodes of this podcast. Feel free to hit us up to request that today we have Michael Kopko, who is the CEO and founder at Pearl Health and he's going to talk about the challenges in the health tech industry, what he has to deal with day in and day out. Michael, welcome buddy.

Speaker A: Thanks Steve. Good to be here and excited for a good discussion.

Speaker B: All right, please tell our listeners about Pearl Health and what you guys do.

Speaker A: You know, in a nutshell, we help providers, physicians, hospital systems, nurses, manage their Medicare patients, but we manage them a little bit differently than people might suspect or be willing to do. We take responsibility for their cost and for their outcomes. So our technology partners with effectively your doctor and we are in partnership with them and the government to say we're going to manage the full cost and we're going to manage to better outcomes. And the premise of why we are in this position is we get a lot of information on patients, we know what's going to happen before it happens, and we try to avoid bad things happening to seniors now. A quarter of a million and growing to 500,000 here shortly.

Speaker B: Wow. Now tell us, is that a normal operating model in your space of uh, taking responsibilities for costs and outcomes?

Speaker A: Well, the biggest way people know this is insurance, but people don't like insurance companies because the way they do it is they take the money and then they throttle what you get. And so that has created a friction that we all know and has led to some really crazy things as of late. What we propose is a different world where the people that are taking care of you are understanding of the cost and the consequences of the cost. So we take that friction from the insurance model and we move to what's called an aligned model or an accountable care model and we bring providers into that. So it is different. It is, you know, pretty radical in terms of how the world has worked to date. But we are not alone either. And the best part about it is you get better outcomes for patients and CMS. Dr. Oz, everybody down the line when you study this, you just get better care when your caretakers are in the entire equation of what needs to be delivered versus kind of at odds with

Speaker B: the insurance company and correct me if I'm wrong. So your company has had very good luck securing financing, uh, investment. You said you have over 250,000 seniors in your system, growing to 500,000, over 100 million in revenues. So you're no startup.

Speaker A: We're. Yeah, we're probably not a startup if I call us a growth, growth stage company now. But you know, we keep those startup roots because I think that's the fun part, the uh, you know, the ability to be able to build quick and to have a lot of ownership. But yeah, we've gotten to real scale now. We work with major enterprises and health systems that you'd know. We manage three and a half billion dollars of Medicare expenses. We're about 1% of managed Medicare, traditional uh, Medicare at this point. And um, you know we'll probably grow by 50 to 70% going into next year. So you know, we're getting a bigger part of that pie. But most importantly because we're getting better outcomes, we're lowering the cost of care, we're delivering a uh, longer life and avoiding bad things for seniors. That's the secret sauce.

Speaker B: Well, so let's talk about your tech platform that's pulling it off and an industry that can be very highly regulated, challenging, difficult. Tell us about your tech platform and your tech team supporting it.

Speaker A: Well, so we have a full stack we built for ourselves. So we're not using, you know, a third party technology. We partner uh, with AWS. We use kind of Claude and uh, OpenAI. We have kind of a lot of different inputs to it, but it is ours. Our cto, Matt Solnit and we A structure of scrum teams that partner directly with a product group. And that whole group, our kind of uh, R and D unit as we call it's about 70% of the company now. So we are an all in bet on technology as the way through and the way the platform works. We take in a tremendous amount of data on patients all through a regulated process. So that, you know your comment about you've got to be careful in a regulatory environment with patient health data, we take that very seriously. It's critical. It adds to some of the expenses of what we do and it also slows the speed a little. But that's acceptable because we're dealing with human lives. And then what we're starting to get very good at having done this now for six years and million million plus kind of patient life data access here we, we can predict pretty well what's going to happen to people in senior care. And you know, one of the things I would say for folks who aren't close to the 65 and plus and I'll tell you, death, taxes and medic is pretty much a guarantee in everybody's life you make it to 65. Most things are predictable. There are not proverbial traffic accidents and if it is predictable it is broadly preventable. So we kind of focus on that discipline. How can we predict and then prevent through automation?

Speaker B: All right, I'm going to ask a crazy off topic question here, but do you really think Medicare is going to be around by the time you or I are ready for it? Yes.

Speaker A: Now it may have different rules and different elements to it, but I think it would really lead. There'd be a very different taste in how people think to get to that place. Now you will hear with a budget, you know, it can't support itself. So that's where there might be some movement of okay, do we want to make changes on age? Do we want to have more co pays? I will tell you value based care, what we kind of are accountable care is the easiest way to make it more affordable longer term because we're saving money. We're constantly pulling 3 to 4% of the costs out. But I don't see Medicare going away because we don't as a uh, United States, as a citizenry, we don't like the idea of our seniors being unable to get healthcare in their, you know, end of life and kind of twilight years. And I don't think that value is going to change in the next 10 or 20 years.

Speaker B: If there's any industry that needs this disruptive Tech solution, it's healthcare. And so 70% of your company now you said is, is tech related based on what you're doing and is that team remote? Are you hybrid? Are you in person?

Speaker A: We've got a little bit of both. But I mean at an ultimate rule level, people can work where they want and where they're comfortable. There are some rules around Medicare, so most of our people are in the United States because you can broadly not move Medicare data outside the country for a lot of good reasons. So we are uh, distributed in that sense. We have offices in New York, Boston and Seattle. We do see a lot of our colleagues in those places, but we don't have requirements to be there. And I also never went to like days in office and tracking and all of that. I love seeing people, I love working with people, but just never wanted to go into a rule based system where we kind of take attendance.

Speaker B: Awesome. So dealing in the healthcare industry, there are certainly many unique challenges you gotta deal with. How in the world do you get providers to change and to follow a new technology to adapt?

Speaker A: Well, I think the first answer is not easily. And um, when I started selling one of my and I was kind of the first salesperson in many ways we would tell physicians, if I pull out an app, you can hit me with my phone. Because I just don't think they want to see the demo and the sales pitch around more technology. Now they deeply value technology and I think that's something that anybody who's uh, either a physician or provider out there probably knows. But it's not that they don't like technology, it's that it's the most oversold category, you know, in the country. In many ways they're getting offered these solutions daily. So I think that the trick or the solve is you have to focus on what their outcomes are, not what you're trying to sell. The answer through all of this is how do you help them improve their business, their practice, their community's health? And then aligning technology, because that's the way to do it, you align technology to that. And I think we made a lot of progress. It's always harder, it always takes a little longer, but that's the way through. Um, that kind of tougher initial sale is just to kind of keep coming back to the outcomes. And I know we'll get to it. But we've also proven we get behavior change and we get engagement now. And it's incredible the amount of change we've gotten over the five to six years. But you have to have a plan to do it. Over that period, very few solutions kind of disrupt overnight.

Speaker B: So what unique technology challenges are you having? Whether it's integrating with the provider's current systems, whether it's getting them or their staff to use it. Uh, what are some of the unique challenges you're dealing with?

Speaker A: There are a lot of challenges. So this is not an easy sport. The first is often like, we don't want another point solution. Nobody wants to add yet another vendor into the mix. And as you get into larger and larger enterprises, they have walls built to protect against it. Review soc, hipaa, uh, um, you know, CFO and finance compliance people do not. Broadly, they're not designed to be adding lots of technology. That's not the culture. It's let's try to make what's working and then we need something, let's go out and do an RFP or a bid, by and large. So that's kind of issue number one. Issue number two is often a security lip like you have to be able, when you're exchanging data with these organizations, they need to make sure that you are going to protect that data. Now there's like a check the box, are you sock two? And instead of high trust, but then there's the who are you? Who are your people? How long have you been doing this? One data breach and you can ruin an organization. So there is a challenge to scale. I think the third big piece is around interoperability. The ability for systems to talk to each other is a little bit of a challenge still. So I don't know how deep you've gotten. See with your audience around ehr, zmrs

Speaker B: like Epic, Cerner, we talk about them all the time. Probably, if I had to guess, 35% of our listeners, uh, are in the health tech industry.

Speaker A: Okay, so some of those folks want to play nice and some of them, that's just not their business. And I don't want to call them out, but the, you know, the, like, let's call it the epics and the Sterns of the world. Their business model is not to say how do I work with the next startup and integrate with them. That's just not their business model. You know, some of the others are a little bit more forward on that, the Athenas, you know, some of the ECWs, et cetera. So you have to kind of go where you can first get started and then you've got to find intelligent ways to partner with the big systems because they're installed, they're not going anywhere. Uh, and so you have to figure out a way to play nice with them. And so that's, that is a third part of the challenge when you're delivering technology into the healthcare sector more broadly.

Speaker B: Gotcha. And that's a good point. I mean there's those giants in there, they're not going to change, uh, just to change. And so, um, that is a great tip, making sure with the health tech play that uh, you figure out how to play nice with them.

Speaker A: Yes, and there are different ways through and we're still working on some of them to be fair. But uh, I also think over time very few things that don't produce value can sustain. Now that time span can be frustrating. But the thing you should always return to is if you're delivering real value creation, it's hard to keep you down. And for folks who are kind of destroying it, it's often hard for them to survive that for long periods. That doesn't mean they can't pull it off for a couple years. So I do have kind of just an optimistic mindset. If you build value for your clients over time, it will, it will kind of beat and it will overcome those obstacles.

Speaker B: What would you say are the hardest parts of building software and technology for your industry?

Speaker A: A lot. Um, you know, I would say that the first thing really becomes kind of almost the being born part where you need to build something that you then need to sell. And most businesses just never get off the ground right there. It costs a lot to build that first one point. It's changing with AI. But if you look back the last 10, 20 years, you know, you were talking millions of dollars to get your kind of first launch. Now you're probably in the hundreds of thousands, but then, okay, who's going to buy it? And the buying cycle is really hard. There uh, are very few and there's a couple of them we can talk about. Companies are just crushing it. But for most companies, you know, 98% of them, they've got to solve a big buying cycle that is just multi year, it's multi nodal. So you got to get a lot of people to say yes, it is, uh, sometimes confusing and it has a lot of check, check marks. So that's kind of the first part. The second is, you know, engineering talent. There's a lot of folks now that actually are very experienced with this, so that's great. But if you don't know those cultures and communities, like if you're kind of coming from a different industry trying to build in healthcare, there are a lot of rude surprises on regulatory rules, compliance, security that you can have like a general appreciation for coming from defense or whatever it may be. But you have to have domain specific knowledge. So I see a lot of first time health entrepreneurs struggle, uh, because they just don't have that kind of norms, rules of the road, domain expertise. I would say that's kind of the second bucket. You know, the third is just the mindset that you have to have kind of a 10 year change mindset in health care. There's a reason why you don't have like social app media growth in health care for most services because human lives are at stake. So people want to see the results. They don't want to give you. They don't want to make a mistake that's aggressive. They want to make a mistake that's conservative. They'd rather miss some opportunity than make a mistake that leads to someone's demise or injury or disease or something. So there's just a kind of conservatism and a lot of entrepreneurs are just not wired well for that. A lot of tech teams are not wired well for that. You know, I think we are and you know, and, but I think that's a piece that a lot of people don't appreciate. Is that when you, like when I started Pearl, I'm like, this is going to be a 10 year old proof point, you know, and then what do you want to do from 10 to 20 years is, are you a real platform?

Speaker B: And uh, correct me if I'm wrong, you, you founded the company in 2020, right?

Speaker A: Yeah, we got started in 2020. We're coming up on six years old.

Speaker B: Wow. And you guys have been moving fast and furious. What's become harder as your company continues to grow?

Speaker A: I think there's this, uh, there's always this question of are you doing enough? Are you keeping up with the pace of innovation and change that, you know, keeps you up at some level? Because we're competitive and we want to deliver impact and the world's fast moving, so that's one, uh, I think there's a little bit of a talent transition over time. You know, what got you here won't necessarily get you there. And individuals can do those transformations like they was very successful in your first few years as a startup. That skill set's actually not the dominant skill set anymore. There's a new one and then you have to recruit some senior people and that can go well, that can go badly. But I think those are the things that are on my mind as we get into you know, I think we're clearly at product market fit. I think we're clearly at a spot where, like, unit economics, we can be sustainable. Then the question is, you know, are you a category winning platform? And what is it? What does it mean to be that clients love you? The economics lineup, the talent is awesome and kind of perpetuates, um, the brand speaks for itself. Like, you got to get all that into place.

Speaker B: So, um, product market fit, um, how do you think that's ch. I mean, so you guys have clearly proven you have product market fit. But in this rapidly changing time, how do you make sure you're keeping that product market fit? Past couple years have changed most entrepreneurial definitions and rule books.

Speaker A: Yes, for sure. Well, I mean, one, and I'm a huge fan of Mark Cuban's, but there's this phrase he always uses about gotta keep grinding. You gotta be in the market, you know, and if you're in the market a lot and you're doing the pitches and you're hearing from your team and you're reading the slacks and you're just getting a sense of what people want, where the. Where things are going, where you're losing, that teaches you where you need to go as an organization. And I've had several of those reflections and could share them, but you kind of get to these moments of insight where you're like, hey, we're gonna have to change. If we want to keep being what we want to be, this is no longer good enough. And a lot of folks, in particularly groups of people, that's a very hard moment, because change is hard. Nobody really, really wakes up saying, I can't wait for things to change today.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: So you have to figure out, how do I. How do I articulate these moments clearly and keep the people that we need to keep with us and doing it, and then you got to be in the flow. You know, I don't think this is a from the mountaintop type job where you just come down and say, I figured out where the world's going. Um, you have to have enough time to reflect and see things objectively, but then you got to be out, they're in the market. And it is, to your point, it's a fast changing time and there's going to be a lot more change coming. So, you know, keeping humble is kind of dose number one in the morning. Just be grateful for what we've got, and then you got to earn the keep today.

Speaker B: What are some of the biggest challenges your team's facing in keeping up with product and engineering backlogs, I think.

Speaker A: So we went through, I would say, two big, like, epochs or cycles as a company. When we started, it was very hard to hire engineering talent. This was, you know, 2020, you mentioned. It was like a Covid period. There's a really weird dislocation. So we kind of struggled to field the team early that would kind of build what we wanted at the rate we needed. We then got back to pace, and then we realized the infrastructure that had been built needed to be transformed. So we went through kind of a little bit of a fix, uh, the foundation of the house, period. So that was another kind of big cycle for us. We kind of, you know, six months or so other things were happening, but we had to change that infrastructure. And now we're in the phase where I think it is, are we building at the rate we need to build at to be successful? And I think we are seeing that, but that is a continuous question. How are we confident of that? What gives us that confidence? Can we turn that into kind of a metric or a system? And, you know, sometimes, you know, Matt Solnit, our cto, I have these conversations pretty frequent with him. You don't want to be like, you know, the supervisor checking in. That's not energizing. But you want to figure out, how do you give people the energy to go do work? Because, you know, another version of Pearl is just the straight out lives we save, the life years we add to the average Medicare life. We manage the dollars that you don't have to spend at the, not only the taxpayer level, but the individual level. You know, in Medicare, on average, you're paying 10% of the bill. So every, every hundred dollars we save, we're sending $10 for that beneficiary. You know, so, uh, I'm trying to keep the pace of what can that world look like in the future and how do we motivate people to build that at the greatest rate we can without trading security safety on, uh, you know, being up, uptime and kind of excellence all the time. And then that's, you know, something I think we've done very well and Matt and the team have done very well at.

Speaker B: When you look at how AI has transformed technology, software engineering over the past couple years, the trend that we are constantly seeing is that engineers have done an amazing job of grasping AI to help with coding assistance, to be more productive. But you look at before and after, when it gets to the engineers, product teams, uh, although making prototypes is very easy these days, with the Advancements in AI, a lot of product teams are still struggling to push things through fast enough. And then on the other side, once engineering is done, most are still requiring manual PR and code reviews prior to deployment. And that's where we're often seeing the bottlenecks. What are you seeing?

Speaker A: So we, we went through a couple evolutions. First was do we want to do AI? Which that didn't last long, but it was, uh, hey, is this going to wreck things versus improve productivity? We are now in that fully embraced phase and there are some, you know, real forces. And the bottleneck to be most direct to your question is probably, uh, what we used to call this at Bridgewater, like is it in systems? Meaning great idea, but have we made that a part of how the company operates? And I think what AI allows you to do is build a lot of cool tools, even kind of certain product level, app level things, but often changing kind of the system level mechanics of a process, connecting data sets, then being able to run reports off those data sets or serve quotes off those data sets or whatever. AI is not quite there yet. It is with that, plus a person is getting there. But AI of itself is not there yet. And happy to have that debate with it. I believe it will be one day. I'm not a, uh, Luddite.

Speaker B: AI is fantastic, but I will argue to the death. You're episode 207 of this podcast. I've only had two guests make claims that AI will completely replace software engineers, product teams and every other guest agrees it's a phenomenal tool for productivity. But there is still the inherent need for a human in the loop, making sure to have quality control checks and that, you know, it's advancing quickly. But I, uh, fiercely believe the software engineering world will not be going away. It'll just evolve.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think great engineers, and they'll be a little bit different maybe than what a great engineer was 10 or 20 years ago. But great engineers will do even better, will be compensated even more, will be more productive, and will be able to develop and build things faster. You're seeing this with a lot more companies hitting revenue rates with smaller talent bases than we've ever seen before. It's incredible. I mean, the number of people at Anthropic and Open Air would shock you based on the revenues. I was shocked, you know, and this was like, I'm probably on a year old data now, but there were like a thousand people and you're approaching 10 billion in revenue. I mean, it's just wild. So we're Changing human productivity. For us, bottleneck is in systems. And I would say, you know, maybe just as a, as a brief kind of just anecdote. I was, you know, we had a welcome event, one of our engineers with us quite some time, really good engineer. I asked him like, his name's Evan. You know, how many Evans does AI get us? Is it like 1.1? Like, do you feel 10% more effective? Is it 2? He was like 2.25. I was like, that's, that's incredible. Like, and you, can you explain that to me a little more? I feel like for me it's about 1.4 or something, you know. And he said, well, there's a backlog of things that we normally wouldn't build. And I look at that list and I'm just more motivated to build because I can go faster. And I've trained agents to then react and build in the way I needed to. That took me a little while, but now I can just build things at a much faster rate. So what was on the list and would have been kind of like next month? I'm just doing it. And so, you know, there is some world that doesn't sound crazy to me. And then you're saying, okay, the, you know, we're going to have a long term decline in the cost of these tokens, so you've got to manage it. But I'm not worried about that trade off if it's managed well. And to me there is no looking back. This is the future. We're excited about it and you know, there are some nuanced things to manage it well, but we're definitely going to this world.

Speaker B: So we work with a lot of health tech, uh, clients and we're often seeing product teams struggling to take from idea to get it ready for engineering because they have to get so many sign offs from compliance, from medical, from all these different areas that we're seeing that being a big bottleneck. And it's not, there's not incompetence, there's not lack of systems, it's making sure to check all the boxes. What have you guys experienced there?

Speaker A: I would say at some level there's like just a physics reality to that description. Like, and I'll put it back to you for a second, Steve, what do you want to do tonight? And you can just tell me, like, yeah, I'm going to the movies, I'm going to have a dinner. Okay, what are you and your five friends going to do tonight? But all five of them have to go with you, there's no way you can answer that question unless you'd already set it up faster than what Steve going to do tonight. So one of the things that you just have to start thinking through, especially in a health tech world, there are stakeholders. You know, you can keep those stakeholders to a minimum, but there will always be more than the individual. And so then you think about how do you design things that can make that go round quickly. And so examples of that and there may be better ways to do this out there. So we just kind of want to share the knowledge is you have a way to make those decisions, like you have reviews, you have meetings, you have kind of proposals and structures so that you kind of force things into a process. Two, you get the rules up front. What are you going to want to see and or approve in advance so that we can kind of put this into a formula? Three, you fund it. You know, things without mandates, things without support are not going to get through. And then four, I like to have good executive review that makes sure like you can always have a local maximum, but it may not be the global maximum. So someone might say, this is really important for me and I'm going to either stop it or start it. But when you sum it out, it either can determine a process. You need to have one level of review that can say, hey, that doesn't add up. And it may be simultaneous if you want to. And I'm getting a little bit into workflows more than maybe the detail you want. People always think in serial. I got to do A to then do B, then to do C. Fastest way to increase speed. Do A and B simultaneously and then you can fire C and you can maybe do A, B and C at the same time. So parallel processes are always faster than serial. So unless the prior process is dependent on the next, you really got to think about the design of those stages. But I would say having a good executive review and then really making sure you don't add extra things in a process. Elon Musk likes to say the fastest path to efficiency is deletion. How many things can you delete in a system? Because a lot of things that are created as rules never get re looked at as whether those rules create the value that they're supposed to create.

Speaker B: As CEOs and leaders, our job is to constantly solve challenges. And I'm a big believer that your net worth, uh, uh, really as a professional, no matter what you do, is your ability to solve more challenges than most people. And as I hear you talk about how you attack things, how you go about it. You seem to be a master of that.

Speaker A: Well, I mean, uh, you know, that will be determined by my colleagues in the world. I will say the job is problem solving. And, um, you know, I have a couple jokes I like to say when people kind of work close with me and they get bad news, I'll say, you think you got bad news, Wait a little longer, you'll get more bad news, you'll get worse news. So, you know, if you think as an executive your job's not dealing with bad news, you're in the wrong job. I think almost at some level, majority of the job is kind of the free safety of solving organizational problems that come up that are often unexpected. And think your attitude is the first thing. Are you kind of running into that burning building, or are you, you know, kicking the proverbial, you know, dirt or dog, if you will, saying, hey, I can't believe this is happening to us. This is unfair. And so that's kind of a big part of our process, is just making sure everybody on the executive layer knows that's that's the job and that's what's gonna come. Um, and then we can get into some of those war stories. But I actually, I always remind people in their career, like, those are also often defining moments for careers. And I know people don't always embrace or want them, but they will build your character as a leader.

Speaker B: I couldn't agree more. And I always find it funny when I'm dealing with friends or family and they're complaining, gosh, I wish I made more money. But then, um, they're telling me how they. They don't check emails at night, how they hate dealing with challenges, how they just want to have their head down and do their work. And I'm like, you do realize to make more money, it's about solving challenges, right? They're like, no, it's about just doing my job. And sometimes you gotta shake people on that. But it's good to hear that that's embedded in your culture.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I would say. And, uh, you know, people have lots of thoughts on things. So I don't mean to say that my view is how everyone should operate, but I think ultimately you're compensated by the problems you solve, the value you drive. And I appreciate the dynamics of promotions and salary negotiations, but when I look at my career responsibilities I took on and the outcomes I delivered are most associated with progress as it relates to, you know, compensation or growth, et cetera. So having an Openness to, you know, when the company's having a problem and you can solve it, that's a big opportunity. And I, you know, in my Oscar time, uh, you know, and I, I really love my time there. One of my goals was I wanted to be one of the first phone calls when things weren't going well and my team, me and my team, like I wanted to be the, you know, the bat, the proverbial bat signal. Like call them in, they'll solve it. And, and that, what that means is stress, longer days and often there's not a direct like you got promoted cause you solved that problem. It, it often is. You get more work now and a lot of people also feel that that's an unfair system. I, I understand that point of view. But um, I'm, you know, my recipe has been if you solve big problems, you understand a lot more at scale and that is an inevitable progression and the world kind of just wants more of those people and will keep pulling them up and through.

Speaker B: Mike, last question. You've, you've. I can't even uh, I'm trying to think of a nice way to say it. You're kicking ass and taking names. Your company is only six year old. You're hitting huge milestones, great progress. What advice do you have for other founders, CEOs, others who want to get into a health tech related venture? What advice would you have?

Speaker A: Well, I would say it's not, it's not easy. So make sure that you love what you're doing because you will often hit hardship and you'll be alone solving that problem. So don't do it just because you want the title or the accolades. It is mostly um, best done when you love the thing you're working on. It helps to have experience or people who have experience. You know, first time in health tech is really hard. You know, I don't want to scare people away, but there is just, there are a lot of bumps in the road that are foreseeable if you've done it before. And then the third, you know, somewhat counter to the first two, you don't have much to lose. After my first failed startup, Bridgewater hired me and you know, good entrepreneurs, people want them even if it's in a job or a next company. So if you really believe you can do it, go for it. The downside's often quite low if you're positively intentioned and you're hardworking.

Speaker B: Uh, I love it and I uh, I wrote a book last year called Fail Hard, Win Big and it's my life entrepreneurial story of having 30 ventures and 20 of those failing and 10 winning. And my book is really about you need to embrace failure, that if you're not failing, you're not taking enough risks. And I know as an entrepreneur you learn a heck of a lot more from your failures than you do successes.

Speaker A: Totally. I mean, you know the great thing, we live in a country where people like seeing the redemptions and the second chances. We have a kind of a wiring for that. So that's great. And yeah, I think people think risk is more than it is. Sometimes being in a corporate job has got more risk than a brand new startup because skill sets can atrophy and agility can decline. So anyway, I think it's always great to try to swing for something big and do what you believe in. It's very little downside in those moments as long as you have a grip on reality and can process data well and kind of integrate that as you evolve.

Speaker B: Michael, really appreciate you sharing all this and getting uncensored with us today. That's it for this episode of Software Leaders Uncensored. If you're leading a tech organization and any of these patterns sound familiar, make sure you hit subscribe. I'm Steve Chaplin. See you next time. That's a wrap. Another great episode of Software Leaders Uncensored. Thank you guys so much for listening. I really appreciate it. It's a lot of fun doing this show. I love talking with great tech leaders. As a side note, if you're interested, check out my new book Fail Hard, Win Big. This is the story of how I built built 30 companies, failed on 20 and turned 10 into multi million dollar wins. The common thread with all of them was custom software. Also, if you need software development help out there, my company Sanotify Technology, we deliver world class software development engineers out of Latin America. We have a solid track record of helping companies launch better products and faster. Thanks again for listening. Appreciate it and appreciate you.