Big Picture Medicine

Part 2 with Joe DeVivo, the MedTech CEO who sold InTouch to Teladoc for over $1B and promised himself never to do another turnaround.

Two years later, the board of Butterfly Network called w/12mo cash left.

Here's how he did it.

Tom Bartlett spent 22 years inside the NHS. For three and a half years, he led the 150-person engineering team at NHS England that built the £330M Federated Data Platform with Palantir.

He left a month ago and he's the only insider speaking publicly about what the platform actually does, what it costs, and whether the NHS has any credible alternative.

We cover the architecture, the cost, the CLOUD Act, the BMJ exposé, the conflicts of interest at Chelsea & Westminster, and whether ministers should trigger the break clause.

Jared Dashevsky, MD (Healthcare Huddle) and Ala Alenazi, PhD (Kinnevik) join Mustafa to discuss:

1. The rise of the AI Broker (a middleman that's about to emerge)
2. Palantir's £330M NHS break clause
3. OpenAI as pharma. We also discuss why drug discovery needs a "Human Genome Project 2.0"

Jared Dashevsky, MD (Healthcare Huddle) and Ala Alenazi, PhD (Kinnevik) join Mustafa to discuss:

1. Healthcare spends 75% on services and 3–4% on IT -- yet every AI startup is pitching a copilot. Sequoia's new thesis: the next trillion-dollar healthcare company won't sell software at all. It'll just do the work.
2. The PCP Apocalypse. Urgent care has tripled, PCP density is down 22%, and behavioral health visits just overtook primary care. We debate whether the answer is more PCPs or changing the role.

1. Kalshi for clinical trials. A Stanford PhD built a public market where nine frontier AI models bet on Phase 3 outcomes. Ala calls it "capitalism's final boss" and explains why it might be the most dangerous innovation in pharma this year.

Jared Dashevsky, MD (Healthcare Huddle) and Ala Alenazi, PhD (Kinnevik) join Mustafa to discuss:

1. The wellness industry is now four times bigger than pharma -- and peptide parties are the new IV drip bars.
2. What's going on there? OpenEvidence built a $12B company on physician search, but everyone's copying the playbook. Is there any moat?
3. World models coming -- and why LLMs might not be enough to fix healthcare.

What can healthcare learn from Candy Crush? A lot. Jason Oberfest (VP Healthcare, Oura) used gaming psychology to build a first-of-its-kind digital health company (backed by Kleiner Perkins) — as well as roles at MySpace, Apple and more.

Now he's bringing that playbook to Oura, following their $11B valuation and booming growth.

Links

Jason Oberfest: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonoberfest/

Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/

What does it take to build a $100M healthcare company? Honestly, no one really knows — and the people who do don't tend to talk about it.

But Steve Kraus and his team at Bessemer have actually studied it. They've analyzed hundreds of venture-backed healthtech companies and published the research.

In this episode, I pull six lessons from their work and ask Steve to explain them.

Links

Steve Kraus: https://www.bvp.com/team/steve-kraus

Dr Mustafa Sultan: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.musty.io⁠

Music: “Habanera” by Kevin MacLeod

Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Edited for length.

What actually happens after you sell a company for $1.1B and never need to work again?

Joe DeVivo is a legendary MedTech CEO who sold InTouch to Teladoc in a $1.1B deal and is now President, CEO, and Chairman of Butterfly Network.

Joe has a very specific reputation in the industry. He steps in when companies get stuck. Often at the moment when a founder-led business needs a different kind of leadership to scale. In this episode, Joe breaks down his turnaround playbook step by step, from how he diagnoses what’s broken, to who stays, who goes, and how focus gets restored.

He also opens up about something that’s rarely talked about. What it really feels like after a massive exit. When the money hits, the anxiety leaves your body, and you realize you never have to work again. What does “post-economic” life actually look like, and why do some people still choose to come back?

We also trace Joe’s path from growing up in a family-run manufacturing business to becoming the CEO boards call in moments of crisis, and why invention and scaling are fundamentally different jobs.

Links

Butterfly Network: https://www.butterflynetwork.com

Dr Mustafa Sultan: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.musty.io⁠

In 2023, Alexandre Lebrun pointed two exits in conversational AI at Medicine. Nabla raised $120M and spread to 130+ orgs and 85,000 clinicians in record time. 

But in the ambient AI game -- it seems like distribution beats all. How will Nabla win?

Links

Nabla: https://www.nabla.com/

Dr Mustafa Sultan: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.musty.io⁠

In 2017, Andrew Parker launched Papa with a 1-800 number, offering 'grandkids-on-demand' in Miami. By 2021, the company was valued at $1.4bn (backed by SoftBank and Tiger Global).

This is a YC-backed gig economy company operating in the regulated elder care market at unicorn scale.

On paper it shouldn't have worked -- and yet it did.

Links

Papa: https://www.papa.com/

Dr Mustafa Sultan: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.musty.io⁠