00:19 Hey, welcome back to another episode. And today I am so blessed to have with us Taha, who is doing a lot of really cool things. And we're gonna dive right in. Taha, tell us who you are and what do you do?

00:31 Hey Todd, great to meet you. So I guess I'm a serial entrepreneur. I've been really lucky in my life to be able to be in several businesses that have been successful. I was trained as a computer scientist and I was lucky enough to work at Apple a couple times, which was a transformational experience for me. I was even lucky enough to work under Steve Jobs in iMovie and that was really pretty amazing experience.

00:55 Wow, very cool.

00:56 I spent most of my time in San Francisco in the Bay Area. But what I'm doing now is I'm doing a couple of things. But the primary thing I'm doing is I'm the founder and CEO of spiral.health. And we are a healthcare SaaS software platform. And what we're working on is trying to automate something that is really, really manual and does not serving patients well, which is a tumor board. And a tumor board is where a set of doctors right now, they usually sit around the conference room table try to decide what the best course of action is. It's not a terribly data-driven decision-making process and it's not collaborative. So, Spiral.health's kind of flagship product is an AI-enabled tumor board. And we just have the MVP and beta up and running. It's a really, really exciting time at the company and we think we can fundamentally change healthcare and the way give doctors superpowers by having software and machine learning and AI help them make better clinical decisions. I'm super passionate about this. My mother died of cancer, and so this is really an important problem for me to solve.

02:05 Gotcha, gotcha. I was just gonna lead into that. I was like, all right, there's a backstory here. Tell us why this is important to you because most people don't jump from software into healthcare.

02:16 Yeah, so you're right. I was very lucky. I was working in the Bay Area. I was working on consumer software. I was working on internet software. And kind of like catalyzing event for me that changed everything was that my mother got cancer, as I previously said. And when I was flying back and forth from San Francisco to Chicago, because that's where they were, I realized that like healthcare IT was in a stone age. And just kind of simple questions that we could ask in Silicon Valley about data interoperability and being able to receive data feeds was non-existent. I kind of made a mental note like, hey, I think I can solve this. These are problems that people like me can solve. And what I learned was normally the people, like some of the best computer scientists from the best schools, and I'm lucky enough to be one of those, immediately go to Silicon Valley and work at Google or Apple or Facebook. And they're not working on health care problems. But health care is where you can really have a big impact on real people. So that kind of changed my... This is my third health care company now. I was extraordinarily lucky in the first. The first one that I was very lucky, one of my biggest mentors hired me and we were very lucky to sell that to UnitedHealthcare. So I'm a healthcare entrepreneur now. I think there's a ton of opportunity to make a real difference in real people's lives. And that's what excites me and gets me up every day.

03:34 I love it, I love it. And I gotta tell you, there is a lot of movement going on right now in healthcare because I think the world recognizes, at least America recognizes, our healthcare system really sucks. And so when you've got all this technology and all these smart people who are facing healthcare problems, guess what? They're gonna come up with solutions. And that's what I love about people like you. And there's other people that I wanna, I'm already desperate to introduce you to who are also been on the show, talking about healthcare solutions that they've provided and are providing, I'd love to put a group of you together in a room and just say, all right, how can we help each other grow our products? This is awesome, really, really cool.

04:14 This is such a big problem and me and my team, we have a very lucky to have a really strong team, but we're also humble enough to know that healthcare is enormous and you're gonna have to collaborate and work with other smart people to make a real dent. And so we're not, we don't think we have all the answers or that we're gonna do this by ourselves. And so we're always open to collaborations with other folks.

04:34 And listen up on that. For those of you listening who are not currently collaborating with other people, you don't think that anyone's gonna steal your ideas because collaborations are how you all grow together. It's like putting yourself in the same boat and that tide's gonna lift you all up together. I think this is awesome what you're talking about here.

04:53 I'm so glad you brought the lips out. So it's required reading for everybody on my team now, but Rick Rubin, who is a music producer, wrote a book called The Creative Act. And in that he talks about not competition, but collaboration. And you're absolutely right. Ideas are so easy. Execution is hard. And that's certainly something we're gonna talk about when we talk about scaling. And so I think sometimes entrepreneurs and other founders get too caught up that they're not gonna be able to do it they have the best idea and they might have the best idea, but that's not how you're gonna win. You're gonna win by excellent execution. And so that's where you need to collaborate and learn from people who've done it before, know more than you. And people like sharing their ideas. That's what I found. I like doing that and I like collaborating with others. Yeah.

05:40 I love it. I love it. I used to be so scared to share my ideas because I assumed that everybody else was like me and just gonna go execute on it right away. And what I discovered is most people are pretty focused on what they're doing. Not many people are gonna execute.

05:50 Yep. My say is if you hear my idea and you out execute me then you deserve all of the value creation you've got.

06:01 I love it.

06:02  The execution is a hundred percent the name of the game ideas are cheap

06:08 I love it, I love it. 

06:32 100%. Yeah. So it's, yeah. Yeah, really good question. First of all, this was really never possible to get all this disparate healthcare together prior to January, 2023. There's now a common standard called FHIR, Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, which allows every EMR has to be able to support this format. And what this does is, I think it's akin to HTML and HTTP. It makes for the first time healthcare data interoperable from your emergency clinic you went to, to when you were in Florida on vacation and you had to see a doctor, to your primary care physician, to your oncologist. And so now, once we have all the data can talk to each other, healthcare has really become in many ways a big data problem. If we can look at the data together, have smart people in a room be able to collaborate on it and not be siloed, we can come up with better solutions. And yeah, this is, we've been doing this in FinTech and social and lots of other, in software engineering for a long time, it's just new to healthcare. So,

07:41 It's so weird, isn't it? Because we've been so overprotective with HIPAA requirements that nobody was willing to share, yeah, he came to see me at the dentist office three weeks ago, you know what I mean? It's like, come on, how do we help solve a problem without knowing all the details, right?

07:55 100%. And just, I'm glad you brought up HIPAA because as I said before, this is the third time I've worked on a cloud-based SOC 2 compliant HIPAA compliant system. You can do it. And we have an experienced team who knows how to do it. We take data privacy extraordinarily seriously. And maybe we worked with Amazon to make the most secure multi-tenant system possible. So HIPAA is there for a good reason and it should be there, but who's looking at this are the providers, the doctors, the oncologists. They need the best data to make the best decisions. 

08:27 The ones that need to. Yeah.

08:29 Yeah, they need the best data to make the best decisions. And so, just having the data available allows us to do amazing things, like we call it DORA, which is our AI tumor board. We have all the data now, we have the MRIs, we have the lab results, we have the patient data, we have an historical timeline. And now you can look at that and make better decisions for the patient. Our mission is really to better outcomes for the patients. And we feel like if we do that, the other stuff will come. So, make sense?

09:01 And how are you seeing adoption on this? Because I know that, yeah, it totally makes sense. How are you seeing adoption from the healthcare providers though, because I know a lot of like hospital networks like to say, no, sorry, if you're going outside of network, you don't get access to any of the data. Like they're really stupid like that. How do you deal with those networks who are unwilling to participate?

09:24 That's a good question. And I don't know if you want to get into the go-to-market strategy of our early startup, but I would say that you start with individual healthcare systems or academic medical centers. I happen to live in Los Angeles, so either Sinai, or you might go to MD Anderson in Texas. So those networks, they are networks of networks of networks of hospitals. So if you can combine those folks together. And that's how the purchasing works in healthcare too. So having all the hospitals talk to each other would be amazing. We're not there yet, and we're not trying to bite off that big piece of the apple either. So, makes sense?

11:42  Right. Right, right, fascinating. That totally makes sense to me. And I literally had a conversation with a woman yesterday on a, she's a doctor who's trying to, she's trying to revolutionize a lot of things in the healthcare, another introduction. But I'm just, my mind has been spinning about this because there are a lot of great companies out there that provide healthcare benefits to their employees and they are all seeing these benefits. But then there's this huge, huge part of the population who are either self-reployed or work for a smaller company that doesn't have healthcare and they need, they don't wanna go to one doctor and then go to another doctor and have them retake all the x-rays and pay for all the stuff. I love the problem that you're solving.

12:27 Yeah, it's a real problem. And, you know, these are pretty easy statistics that anyone can look up, but, you know, the US spends, I think, per capita the most on healthcare, and we're not in the top 10 on outcomes. And so that's a big systemic problem. I'm not trying to solve that today, but, you know, we could be smarter, we could be smarter, and there's lots of smarter people than me working on healthcare equity. I think that's something that I'm passionate about, but we're working on a narrow problem to really give doctors superpowers so they could make better decisions. And the doctors are overworked. They don't have enough time, you know, so if we can help them by giving them a copilot, we'll have better outcomes for patients. 

13:10 I love it, I love it. All right, so now we know what you do and why you're doing it. Let's talk a little bit about how it's happening because this might be a good time to introduce as well the fact that your SpiralDot healthcare solution is also kind of a sister company with an investment platform that you have, trying to help other startups, trying to, you've had some success. Tell us a little bit about kind of how those two sister companies are working together and then we'll talk about how you've been able to do it at SpiralDot.

13:40 Sure, so just to be for perfect clarity. So they're not sister companies. They happen to share the name because I like that name. And so my day job is I'm the founder and CEO of Spiral.health. And we are an AI enabled tumor board SaaS company for healthcare. And that's what we primarily do. What I'm also participating in a couple other things that are interesting. I found an early stage VC firm that happens to be called Spiral.ventures because I like that name. And what we work on is early stage founders. We have eight or 10 portfolio companies that we work very closely with. We have experts in branding, in marketing, in finance, in SaaS, in tech. And so we're more of a venture studio. We kind of bring our expertise, level up the executive team or help them source the, because usually in the early stage. What happens is you might have a very passionate founder, but the second and third hires will make or break whether you're going to do it or not. And so we can often help founders make, here's the CTO you should hire. Here's the CFO you need. Here's your head of product. And so that's, that's certainly something that I'm very passionate about, but that I also.

14:57 I love it, love it. I just wanted to bring it up because I know there's people listening who are like, okay, I love the fact that A, you've had a successful exit and you're not just sitting around doing nothing. B, you're trying to solve a problem that's very passionate to you. And then C, you're also helping other people solve problems that they don't know how to get past in the growth of their businesses. For all intents and purposes, you're one of those great figureheads that I look at who is giving back in ways that are benefiting causes and people that you care about. I love it.

15:31 I really appreciate you saying that, Todd. I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. My parents came from almost nothing in India and crossed two oceans and really set me up for success. So I owe it all to them.

15:51 Love it. Love it, love it. Well, that's what this podcast is all about too. So let's move forward and help in the cause. Tell us how things are happening because launching in the healthcare industry for most people is very intimidating. There's a lot of red taped cut through to really try and have any solution that will be accepted in the healthcare community. How are you doing this? And your times, but how does it work to launch something into healthcare.

16:16 Yeah, well, you know, if you talk to any founder, any serial entrepreneur, they'll tell you that each time is different. And the things you thought were going to happen are always not the things that are end up being the obstacles. I will say it really helps to be, to be working on my third healthcare startup. So I've worked on something that was sold to United healthcare. I worked on an artificial intelligence startup that helped find patients for clinical trials, built that whole team and rebuilt that whole product and rebuilt their whole software architecture. And so that really, and those were learning experiences I've taken to now deploy as the CEO of Spiral.health. That was very intentional. I'm a pretty intentional person. And ever since my mom died, I've been on a very specific intentional path to be able to solve this problem. So, you know, it's hard to say what it. I haven't had as much fun since I worked at Apple and was lucky enough to work for a seed job. This is the funnest job I've ever had. I wake up at five o'clock every day ready to go. This is, I mean, I wish everyone could be as lucky as I am because I love my job. But I work a lot, but I don't feel like it. It's the funnest thing I've done in a long time.

17:30 Yeah, I love it. So partially because you love the cause, you have a very clear mission, your intentions are good, which all three of those things kind of help align a team behind you that's willing to jump on board with you and make it happen. I think that's a really, really critical part of what you just said. So with that intention and with that movement going forward, what have been some of the highlights in launching SpiralDot that you think have been fascinating to talk about. What are the awesome things that you've seen happen so far?

18:02 Yeah. I'm glad you brought up team because I happen to be the founder and CEO, but I couldn't do anything without the team that I have behind me and I have, I am very fortunate and very lucky to have some of the smartest people I've ever worked with working for me, uh, for spiral.health. And what's great is these folks, this, many of them, this is the second, many of them, this is the third startup they've followed me to, and I take that responsibility really seriously. These are some of the best computer scientists machine learning experts and software engineers and cloud engineers in the world. They can get a job anywhere they want. And the fact that they're, they're joining me on this cause that they believe in that they want to have a big impact on is one of the things I would tell founders that picking the next set of folks is so important because that will set the culture that will set the processes you're going to have as you go through growth and scaling. And it's also just gonna, there's something we learned at Apple about, A player is only want to be around A players. I know it's kind of an overused term, but it's true. You want to have, if you bring in kind of people just to fill seats in the beginning, you'll never keep the talent that high. And we are vicious about only bringing in the best talent. And I'm really, really lucky about the folks that are willing to work with me. They are A players all the way.

19:26 Yeah. Now, touching on that, because this is a big deal. I meet a lot of founders and a lot of people listening maybe in this boat where they raise maybe a Series A or they've got a big seed round or something, and they hire those first few players, right? They hire that first team. And oftentimes they hire A-game players, but they're very underwhelmed because they don't know how to really manage an A player. How have you been able to take an A player and say, let's go do this without having to be in their face all the time? What does that look like for you?

20:04 Yeah. And again, I just want to say how lucky I am to be, you know, when I got out of school, I was trained at Apple by some really, really smart people who really changed my career and my life. And what the kind of ethos is that Apple is hire smart people and get out of their way. And so you have to have a lot of trust. And you have to be willing to say that I hired someone and I don't care how they do it. They might do it different than me.But if they hit the goal, I don't care. And I will say, I've worked with some other founders and other CEOs, sometimes that's hard for them. And that's something that I learned very early in my career. And I love it, man. I wanna be the least smartest person in the room. Otherwise, I'm in the wrong room, right? And so, I think trust is a really big thing. And then understanding, you have to set the culture from the top. So you have to set the example of what is accountability? What do deadlines mean? Are these really soft? And for them, that flows down, I think. And if you have that expectation and it's clear and you communicate clearly, that's what I found is the best way to motivate people. Give them feedback, positive and negative. People want feedback. There's a direct correlation between people being able to receive negative feedback and high performance. And so you want to have people. One of the things I learned in my career now is I used to always hire for horsepower. And what I found out is coachability is more important than horsepower. I like smart people, but if you're not coachable, it doesn't matter. So that's one biggest feedback I would give to other founders is make sure the people you're bringing in on that next level are coachable and are willing to listen to you on how you want to make it.

21:54 So get A, players who know what they're doing, B, they're willing to be coached, and C, they have the inherent ability to also manage their own team without you having to jump over them and trying to rescue them when they're not good managers, right?

22:14 100%. You want, if you're trying to do something big, you need autonomy. You need to give your, and I'll just speak for myself. Like I don't want to be micromanaged. Most really, most good people don't. They want to be given a big audacious task and said, go figure this out. And so if you're micromanaging, I would say either take some management classes or you hire the wrong folks or you hire the wrong folks. That makes sense.

22:40 I love it. It totally makes sense. And I'm gonna follow it up with one more question because I think this is really cool coming from someone like you. So sometimes you have this amazing talent that is like the best at doing this one thing. You hire and bring them in, but you already know they're a horrible manager. How do you keep this person happy and satisfied working in their own bubble, but having someone else kind of manage the team that supports that person so that you're not expecting them to do what they're not good at? You know what I mean?

23:09 Yeah. That's such a good question. And unfortunately, especially in the technical field, as I told you, I grew up as a software engineer. Oftentimes people who are really good at software engineering get turned into managers and those are very different skill sets. Managing people is metaprogramming. You're programming the programmers. That needs very different skills, Ben. And so, I'll just say how we do it. We have very specific job functions and a job ladder and the management ladder and the IC ladder are completely different. And we allow people to, to pick and choose, but, um, you know, leadership, technical leadership and software leadership and people leadership, they're just very different things. And there are not many people who are good at both. And so, um, I would say that on those things, you have to choose wisely. Cause if you pick the wrong manager, you'll demotivate your whole player team. So that's a...

24:08 the whole A player team, that's exactly where I'm getting at. And I'm so glad you said that because this conversation, Talha is very, very relevant to any tech startup. And I think that you having been there, done that and grown and launched, I think this, I hope this is helpful for the listener because they tend to hire awesome coders or awesome programmers and they're horrible managers. And then they end up demotivating the whole team. And I've seen this over and over again, I think you have too. And so that's why I'm asking these questions. I think that these challenges that people face in a tech startup are very, very common. And I think that your solution sounds like an amazing way to avoid, not only does it keep the awesome tech guy from being in that awkward position of dealing with people, because we all know, some coders, yeah, tech. Tech guy or gal is not always a people person. You know, they don't really care. They just wanna keep their heads down and keep their team moving towards the Metro, right?

25:18 And I think part of leadership is finding what people are best at and giving them as much opportunity to do those things. Obviously, things need to get done that no one wants to do and that's necessary. But like if you think if you, I always draw two, three circles. There's a circle of what needs to get done, what you're good at and what you want to do. And I try to maximize the center for all of my employees. So here's what we need to do, here's what you're good at, here's what you want to do. How can we, you know, that's my job as the leader, to see how I can do that. And I think that's one of my strengths. And I think that's why people follow me around because I would benefit so much from some mentors that saw strengths in me that I didn't see in myself that I really like. The funnest part of my job is watching other people grow. And so I really take that really seriously.

25:58 Right, right. Well, Talha, speaking of mentors, is there somebody you'd like to give a shout out to today on the episode, because we love doing that. Who's someone that's influenced you and impacted you in a way that made you feel that way?

26:11 There's, yeah, so there's two people that have really had the biggest impact on my career. One was very early and one was very recent. So the first one is Dr. David Elliott. My first job after Apple, I worked for him at a startup that we also had an exit to. And he was a Stanford PhD, a brilliant man, but he's the one who taught me people matter. You have to understand how to motivate people individually. Everybody wants, some people need a pat on the back. Some people need a kick in the shins. And he, he's the one who identified to me that I would be a good leader. I wanted to just be a coder sitting in the corner. And he said, no, you have a very unique skillset in Silicon Valley. People follow you and you can communicate all to executives and the coders. And so he changed the course of my career. And so big shout out to Dr. David Elliott lives in Seattle. Now he was grew wine. He's like my.. The second person that I wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for him is Dr. Arvind Movva. So Dr. Arvind Mova was the founder and CEO of Divvydose. He hired me to help run all of technology at Dividos. I was tech hire number one. He gave me an enormous amount of trust and latitude to help build the business that was his baby. And he built an amazing C-Suite there and we were able to sell TMI Healthcare, which was transport transformational for me and my family. And I have, Arvin taught me so much about healthcare and healthcare software and how you have to build solutions that work for providers. He was an amazing mentor and I'm so grateful that he chose me that day, so, yeah.

27:55 Yeah, oh, awesome shout outs. Now, awesome shout outs and Taha, I can already tell you're having an impact on the people listening to the show and I hope that this gets to the brunt of the problems that we're seeing in tech startups getting stuck that aren't progressing past a certain stage. I think that the things that you talked about today are gonna help them and I really appreciate you taking the time to be here with us today. And I, you know, as I think about the problem that you're solving. No, 100%, the problem you're solving is so powerful and so amazing and it's a beautiful thing. I don't know anyone who doesn't have cancer impacting someone in their lives. And I think that your research and your product, oh, it's gonna help so many people. And so kudos to you, thank you for doing what you do and applying your skillsets. I love it.

28:45  Really been a pleasure Todd. I'll leave my contact information, if there are folks that wanna reach out to me and learn more, always happy to collaborate with other folks.

28:57 Of course, we're sticking in the show notes and please reach out. If you've got someone who should be connected to Taha, who's in the healthcare or in the startup in healthcare, they could use some rubbing of shoulders with someone who's done it. Let's make it happen. And thanks you all for being here. Taha, thank you again.

29:14 Thanks so much. Thanks, Todd. It's been a pleasure. Have a good one.