Menopause isn’t gentle. For many women, it’s a physiological shockwave — flipping sleep, mood, metabolism, cognition, sexual health, and long-term disease risk all at once. And all too often, the healthcare system’s response has essentially been: “live with it.” 
In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Mindy Goldman, a UCSF gynecologist and nationally recognized leader in menopause and cancer survivorship care, whose career took an unexpected turn from academic medicine into the heart of a fast-scaling women’s health startup. What began as deeply personal loss and years of clinical frustration evolved into something much larger: helping shape Midi, a menopause startup now delivering insurance-covered care to women across all 50 states.
Dr. Goldman shares the formative moments that changed her trajectory, from losing her closest friend to breast cancer, to realizing how many women are dismissed, misdiagnosed, or told to simply “push through” midlife symptoms. We unpack the care gap hiding in plain sight, why menopause became a systemic blind spot in modern medicine, and how Midi is using telehealth, clinical rigor, and scale to rebuild women’s healthcare from the inside out.
This is a conversation about listening to hard experiences, translating clinical insight into infrastructure, and what happens when medicine meets venture-scale ambition. If you care about health innovation that makes a massive impact, this episode shows what it takes — and why it matters now more than ever. 


Subscribe to First in Human: - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd 
Check out Midi's website: https://www.joinmidi.com/

You might be surprised to learn that a particle physicist — someone who knows how to work with massive particle accelerators slamming atoms together — is building a company focused on a sticker that sits on your abdomen.

But once you dig a bit deeper, it makes perfect sense.

In this episode of First in Human, I talk with Steve Axelrod, a longtime physicist turned CEO, whose entire career has been built on pulling meaningful signal out of noise. It's a skill set that's taken him from nuclear sensors at Yale all the way to Silicon Valley, ultimately as a medtech CEO working on a deeply personal problem. 

And along the way, what Steve discovered was unsettling: when it comes to gut-related illness, doctors often can’t measure what patients are feeling. Tests look normal. Symptoms come and go. And care is often based on educated guesswork. So Steve did what physicists do: he started measuring. 

We talk about why he’s now building a wearable “EKG for the gut,” how listening to electrical rhythms over days - not minutes - changes what we see, and why this approach could reshape how doctors understand chronic symptoms, recovery after surgery, and what’s really happening inside the body. 

This is a story about physics, family, and what happens when someone trained to study the universe turns their attention inward - and finally starts listening. 


Subscribe to First in Human: - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd 
Check out G-Tech's website: https://www.gtechmedical.com/  
Connect with Steve on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveaxelrodphd/

What does it really take to decide what’s worth building in healthcare? 

In this episode of First in Human, I sit down with Dr. Ryan Van Wert, ICU physician and serial health tech founder, to unpack how he’s built multiple companies by starting with the most vulnerable moments in medicine. From rethinking sedation for patients on ventilators, to ensuring people’s end-of-life wishes are honored, to helping adult children care for aging parents, Ryan shares how clinical pain points become startup decisions and how needs-first thinking guides what he builds. 

We talk about Stanford Biodesign, the discipline of needs-first innovation, and what years in the ICU teach you about human cost, timing, and focus. Ryan walks through how specific problems rose to the top during rigorous needs-finding, how his thinking has evolved across Awair, Vynca, and now Kin, and what he looks for before committing to build. 

If you’re a clinician, founder, or builder wondering how to choose the right problem to work on and how to build with both rigor and empathy, this conversation offers a rare, grounded look at how real healthcare companies actually get started and why that decision matters more than anything that comes next.

Subscribe to First in Human: - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd 
Visit Kin Concierge online: https://www.kinconcierge.com/ 

It’s one thing to talk about innovation. It’s another to realize, mid-surgery, that nothing in the room was designed for your patient.
In this episode of First in Human, I sit down with Dr. James Wall, pediatric surgeon, serial health tech founder, and VP of Product Management and Associate Medical Officer at Intuitive, to trace his journey. It's a career that's been shaped by building where the market is small and the stakes are high. From completing advanced training in minimally invasive surgery in France to launching multiple startups, to leading pediatric innovation at Stanford, and now - most recently - helping guide the future of surgical robotics, James has spent decades navigating the tension between impact and scale. 
The conversation spans pediatric devices, biodesign, venture economics, and the future of surgery. But at its core, it’s about learning how to build things that matter when scale isn’t guaranteed—and why the hardest markets can produce the clearest thinking about what patients truly need. 

Subscribe to First in Human: - Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd 

Connect with James: - James on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameswallmd/

Sepsis is one of medicine’s most dangerous guessing games. Patients arrive with vague symptoms. Clinicians rely on instinct. And too often, the ones who look “okay” are the ones who crash. 

In this episode of First in Human, I sit down with Dr. Tim Sweeney, physician-scientist and founder of Inflammatix, to trace the unlikely path from a tense moment at a medical conference to a breakthrough FDA-cleared diagnostic now shaping real clinical decisions. Tim shares why leaving residency was the hardest choice he’s ever made, how years of rejected grants pushed him toward entrepreneurship, and what it took to raise more than $150M to build a diagnostic tool medicine didn’t yet have. 

We go inside Trivarity, a blood test that reads the immune system itself to help doctors decide whether a patient has a bacterial infection, a viral infection, or something else entirely and how sick they’re about to become. Along the way, we talk about the limits of clinical intuition, why sepsis isn’t  one disease, and how better decisions, made earlier, can change outcomes. 

This is a conversation about conviction, risk, and what becomes possible when we stop guessing and start listening to the biology.

Subscribe to First in Human: 
- Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 
- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd 


Learn more about Inflammatix: https://inflammatix.com/
Tim on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-sweeney-a6589594/ 

It’s one thing to talk about innovation. It’s another to realize, mid-surgery, that nothing in the room was designed for your patient.

In this episode of First in Human, I sit down with Dr. James Wall, pediatric surgeon, serial health tech founder, and VP of Product Management and Associate Medical Officer at Intuitive, to trace his journey. It's a career that's been shaped by building where the market is small and the stakes are high. From completing advanced training in minimally invasive surgery in France to launching multiple startups, to leading pediatric innovation at Stanford, and now - most recently - helping guide the future of surgical robotics, James has spent decades navigating the tension between impact and scale. 

The conversation spans pediatric devices, biodesign, venture economics, and the future of surgery. But at its core, it’s about learning how to build things that matter when scale isn’t guaranteed—and why the hardest markets can produce the clearest thinking about what patients truly need. 


Subscribe to First in Human: 
- Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 
- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd 


Connect with James: 
- James on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameswallmd/

What does it take to reinvent one of the most iconic tools in medicine? 

In this episode of First in Human, I sit down with Connor Landgraf, co-founder and CEO of Eko Health, to trace the unlikely journey from childhood tinkerer to building a digital-enabled stethoscope that’s quietly reshaping how clinicians listen, learn, and diagnose. 

Connor shares how a gradual realization in a Berkeley classroom led him to challenge a centuries-old design paradigm. Why do we still rely on a hollow tube and human hearing alone to evaluate heart and lung disease? From building early prototypes (which doctors promptly rejected), to the long, patient work of developing data, algorithms, and trust, this is a story about respecting medicine’s traditions while carefully pushing it forward. 

If you’ve ever wondered how real medical innovation gets started, or how technology can augment human judgment without erasing it, this conversation offers a rare, thoughtful look at what it really takes to change medicine from the inside out. 



Subscribe to First in Human: 
- Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 
- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd 


Connect with Connor: 
- Connor's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/connorlandgraf/ 
- Eko Health webpage: http://ekohealth.com/ 

How do you fight a disease that hides until it’s almost too late? 
In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Maria Artunduaga, founder of Samay, whose work began with a moment she still remembers clearly: a conversation about air trapping, a flashback to high-school physics, and the realization that sound might reveal early changes inside the lungs before symptoms appear at all. 
That spark - in a problem inspired by the loss of her grandmother to a COPD exacerbation - sent her down a path to rethink how we detect danger in one of the world’s deadliest respiratory diseases.
Maria shares the unlikely early days: late-night experiments in her living room, patients welcoming her into their homes, and the first hints that a simple wearable patch could capture some of the insights that previously required an $80,000, phone booth-sized machine. 
We explore why respiratory diseases have been neglected by med tech, what makes COPD so deadly, and how a founder from Colombia is building technology designed for the people most often left behind. 
This conversation is about invention, persistence, and what becomes possible when a eureka moment meets a problem the world can no longer ignore. 



Subscribe to First in Human: 
- Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 
- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd 


Connect with Maria: 
- Maria's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drartunduaga/ 
- Samay webpage: https://www.samayhealth.com/home 

An innovator’s first step into the clinical environment - in this case, an ICU built for the world’s tiniest babies - can change everything. 

In this episode of First in Human, I sit down with Eric Chehab, a Stanford-trained biomechanical engineer and founder of Novonate. We explore how a deadly but unaddressed risk in premature newborns became the focus of his life’s work. Eric shares the moment he realized that fragile infants were being protected with tape, improvisation, and sheer nursing ingenuity, and how that small, almost ordinary detail revealed a problem no one had truly solved. 

We follow his unusual path from a class assignment to years of crude prototypes, a slow spinout from Stanford, and the lonely stretch of building a pediatric device company in a market most investors dismiss. Eric opens up about the doubts, the early believers, and the winding strategic conversations that eventually led to Novonate’s acquisition by Laborie. 

If you’re curious how real needs are found, or how a simple idea can become life-changing for the smallest patients on earth, this conversation offers a rare look at the patient and determined work behind meaningful innovation. 


Subscribe to First in Human: 
- Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 
- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd 


Connect with Eric: 
- Eric's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/echehab/ 
- Laborie webpage: https://www.laborie.com/product/lifebubble/ 

Some problems in medicine see so many failed attempts that they start to feel untouchable. Teams learn to move on, investors grow wary, and the problem becomes its own warning label. Kate Garrett and Dr. Dan Azagury chose a different path. 

Kate and Dan, cofounders of Ciel (later acquired by Vyaire Medical), found themelves confronted with one of those notoriously unsolved, high-stakes problems - the kind that had stopped other companies cold. What happened next changed everything for them, their patients, and for medtech. 

In this episode, Kate and Dan share how confronting that kind of problem shaped their partnership, what the journey taught them about trust and perseverance, and why some of the most meaningful breakthroughs begin with the problems everyone else have learned to avoid. 


Subscribe to First in Human: 
- Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/first-in-human/id1842644737 
- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3C1xG5SxPei8m2lI63WSkd 


Connect with Kate and Dr. Azagury: 
Kate Garrett's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kate-garrett-464920/ 
Dr. Dan Azagury's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-azagury-ba70733a/