00:01:41 · Pelu Tran
[00:01:41] S8: Idealist, techy, you know, Stanford grad student in a garage saying, we're gonna make outcomes better. Those companies all fail. Most early stage founders go to partners and say, hey. Like, what is it that you need? Like, tell me, and I'll just deliver it for you. If you're looking to them just to give me the answers, they don't know what's possible technologically oftentimes. They're not sure how the market trends are moving. They're not going to be able to tell you what the answer is. What they're really, really good at is telling you what the problems are. My name is Pelu Tran. I'm the CEO and co founder of Ferrum Health. Ferrum Health is a company that is trying to make clinical AI tools accessible to the doctors and patients that need it. We just closed a $16,000,000 Series A round. We've raised a total of $31,000,000 Our success is going to occur by enabling big tech, big healthcare, governments, AI developers by enabling everyone in the market to be able to collaborate and deploy AI the way it needs to be deployed. I was months away from graduating Stanford Medical School when I actually decided to go and leave to start my first company. As a medical student, kudos goes to Stanford Med for allowing us to be extremely flexible with our time. So I was one of the students who kind of had my hand in all sorts of different pies, where I was doing like device work, was working on side projects with friends from the business school and the medical school. And Augmedix was really at the beginning just one of those side projects. As a medical student, I was working in the county hospital here in the Bay Area. That was a nightmare. I was there while they were transitioning from paper records to electronic records, where doctors were losing track of patients. No one could figure out where medications were. People were burning out and spending three, four times as much of their day on documentation as they were before. And actually, back in the day, this was when Google Glass was still emerging onto the scene. Everyone thought that it was going to be the advent of the wearable era and that emerging technology intersecting with the real pain points that I was seeing in my day to day life as a medical student. We founded Augmedix because we wanted to doctors spend their day taking care of patients rather than documenting patient records.
00:03:53 · Pelu Tran
We showed pretty early on that writing the notes for the doctors actually allows them to deliver better care as well. Two, three years into my first company, I was still considering going back and still thinking about, hey, you know, at what point do I maybe leave the company, go back to medical school, become a doctor? But once we saw our technology being used to deliver care to thousands of additional patients a month, I realized, wow, like I have already had more of an impact on health care than I would have had in my entire career as a doctor. And we went to Sandhill Road and to the venture capital firms there, and we were able to raise a round of funding off of that idea. And we spent a few years probably trying to build out the company, prove out the idea, and ultimately continued to stay on leave from medical school as the company grew. So a few years into the Augmedix journey, I think the whole world started to realize that Google Glass probably wasn't going to be a thing. And so we had to figure out what are we going to do with this company and with this mission if Google Glass isn't going to be a thing and if our company's brand has been built off that so far. Because we had that really clear mission, because we knew, hey, like, you know, it's not about the Google Glass, it's about what we believed the glasses could solve for healthcare, that we were able to pivot and pretty rapidly launch tablet and phone based versions of our software that instead of sitting at a doctor's face, they would bring around either cart around as a tablet or bring it around in their pocket that still did the same thing. I think what that taught me is that if you go into a new technology looking for a problem, you're probably going to get really far but ultimately fail. And I think the difference between Augmedix, which we were able to continue to grow over time, and a lot of those companies is that
00:05:42 · S0, S1, S2, S3, S4, S5, S6
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00:07:05 · S6, S5, S7
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00:07:22 · Pelu Tran
[00:07:22] S8: We started off as a technology looking for a problem, but we just happened to find a really, really big and important problem. And so that allowed us to stay alive. Moving forward from that, I have become really, really careful around new technology trends. Even AI, the new wave of Gen AI, telemedicine through COVID, all of those boom and bust cycles, they all occur around emerging technologies. They never occur around endemic pain points. And so, Gen AI today. Yes, it's promising. Yes, it's going to change the world. Is it going to change the world to the scale that everyone is saying it will, at the timeline that everyone is saying it will? Guaranteed not. And it's because we always tend to overestimate these technologies in the near term. Over the long term, they will have an impact. But that long term is longer timeframe than any one startup is able to weather. During that journey, I actually had an uncle pass away from a late stage lung cancer that was missed by his doctors. And it was a really frustrating experience for myself and my family because I already was a successful entrepreneur in the digital health space. When we were providing care for him and talking to his doctors, he was receiving the best care in the world. He was going regularly for screenings. He did everything right. But because his doctors weren't using the most modern tools, a lot of these AI diagnostic tools around lung cancer that have been launched over the past decade, he wasn't able to actually have his cancer caught in time. In fact, was missed for almost five years. He would have benefited so much from technology, from AI tools. His doctors wanted to use those tools, but hospitals not being able to actually adopt AI themselves directly. Like at some point someone was going solve it. The question was how long will it take to solve? What we realized was if we don't start this company, it is extremely unlikely that someone else will and succeed. Ferrum Health is our attempt at trying to solve this disconnect between the technology that's out there, the need for a platform that allows for the consolidation of AI vendors into a single point. Back when we first started the company, I was really skeptical about how good these AI tools actually were.
00:09:36 · Pelu Tran
Some patients and some hospitals that we worked with in Asia that we launched our pilot product initially, and that was an open source lung nodule tool. It's something that was made available online for public use, And we ran it for three days across their scans. And we basically looked to see how many patients did this model find that the doctors didn't find. And three days later, we're like, Oh, wow, like there are almost 50 patients here who have very significant findings. It makes the mission of the company just so urgent. We happen to have a tailwind of AI hype that maybe it lasts one more year, maybe it lasts three more years, but hype cycles come and go. And so there's going to be a time when that hype no longer is there. But for us, we solve a real problem that endure over time. At some point, you have to be solving a really important problem, or you will never be able to claw your way out of that experimentation early stage. Most early stage founders, first time founders that I meet, are overly focused on building a really good technology product and not enough focus on identifying the exact pain point and problem they're solving. Figure out what matters, what are the risks that I need to de risk, and proving that out even manually, right? Like just by doing it with an Excel spreadsheet or with a human being in the background rather than having to launch the whole product and spending all that money before you've tested out those initial assumptions. COVID was brutal, and this is not a super exciting kind of thing to bring up, but COVID was absolutely brutal. It was especially brutal because the general perspective was, wow, if you're a healthcare company, you should be doing great. But the actual reality was like most healthcare companies