Sanjana Kavula and her three co-founders set out to sell an AI receptionist to hospitals. Eighteen month sales cycles, layers of bureaucracy, and a trust problem no amount of funding could shortcut pushed Kairos Health out of medical entirely and into a market they hadn't planned on: independent dental clinics.

In this episode of The Pitch Room, recorded at Rice University's Lilie Entrepreneurship Lab in Houston, Sanjana traces how a failed hospital sales strategy became a working wedge inside dental offices, why some of her own early "traction" turned out to be exactly the wrong customers, and the moment her team realized they'd spent months chasing a solution instead of a problem. In this episode:

• How an 18 month hospital sales cycle pushed Kairos Health out of medical and into dental
• The discovery process that turned patient intake into their wedge into the market
• Going from a first pilot in the Rio Grande Valley to 11 clinics and growing
• The mindset shift from free pilots to "getting payment is the most validating part of a company"
• Why not all traction is good traction, and how the wrong customers can look like progress
• How Kairos Health handles HIPAA compliance, PMS integrations, and building trust in an industry where one bad reference travels fast

This is part of our Houston mini-series recorded at Rice's Lilie Lab, alongside conversations with Tony Cordova and other founders building out of the same space.

🔗 https://kairoshealthai.com/

Dr. Tony Cordova has spent his career building the systems that turn student ideas into companies. From a biotech spin-out on Chicago's South Side, to a biochemistry PhD at UT Austin, to running Nucleate across all of Texas, he now heads early-stage ventures at Rice University's Lilie Lab. He calls his approach pathologically helpful, and the default is yes.

In this episode of The Pitch Room, Tony traces the nonlinear path. From a pre-med biomedical sciences student at Texas A&M, to an internship at a startup a stone's throw from the White Sox stadium, to a PhD funded by the U.S. government, to overseeing 22 startups across Texas in a single year as managing director of Nucleate Texas, to landing at Rice. He gets specific about what he actually tells student founders: why five customers isn't enough, why most people ask the wrong question about their product, and the one thing he asks every student before they leave his program.

In this episode:

• Tony's Triangle: people, problem, product, and why most student founders neglect the middle one
• The 5-customer minimum in Launchpad, and why most founders never even hit that number
• Problem feedback versus product feedback: the reframe every founder gets wrong
• The question Tony asks in exit interviews that "sucks the air out of the room"
• Why AI is great for a jank MVP, and where it will actively steer you wrong
• What "pathologically helpful" looks like when you run programs for 130 ventures a year

This is episode 1 of 3 in our Rice / Lilie Lab mini-series.

Real conversations with the people actually building things, minus the highlight reel.

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Scott Nortman has spent his career building robots, from spacecraft that fly in formation to surgical systems that help doctors operate. The one closest to home is a bedside robot built to solve a problem he watched in his own family: a CPAP mask his father-in-law tore off in his sleep every single night.

In this episode of The Pitch Room, Scott traces the full arc. From a kid who took apart every camera, VCR, and circuit board he could get his hands on, to the Advanced Technology Center at Lockheed Martin, to orthopedic surgical robotics at Mako, to founding his own company, Restful Robotics. He gets honest about the part most founder stories skip: what it actually takes to go from engineer to salesman, why raising friends-and-family money is not the same as closing a VC, and what he learned pitching a vision a few years before the market was ready for it.

In this episode:

• The first-week idea that became a patent years later, and why every engineer should keep an invention notebook
• How formation-flying spacecraft and drone light shows run on the exact same technology
• The real reason most CPAP patients quit, and the robot Scott built to fix it
• Going from the engineer in the room to the founder who has to sell the vision
• Why he says everything he was pitching back in 2020 actually came true
• His one piece of advice for anyone breaking into the field today

Real conversations with the people actually building things, minus the highlight reel. Follow The Pitch Room on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart, and YouTube so you don't miss what's next.

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