From Early Struggles to Billion+ Exit | SmarterDx Founders Michael Gao & Joshua Geleris
Episode Description
We don't talk enough about how hard it actually is to build a healthcare startup. Behind SmarterDx's story, now one of the biggest health AI exits to date, were 18 months without a single customer, a pivot that seemed to make no product sense, and two co-founders who went back to working as hospitalists just to get by.
In this episode, Steve gets the real story from Dr. Michael Gao and Dr. Joshua Geleris about the challenges they faced and what ultimately unlocked real growth and led to their billion+ acquisition by New Mountain Capital.
We cover:
- Why their first product idea failed and what customer objections actually taught them to build instead
- The counterintuitive workflow that made contingency pricing possible
- How AI translation of clinical notes into billing codes now outperforms the average human, and what that means for coders and nurses
- Why "moat" is the wrong metaphor and what a flywheel looks like instead
- What they'd do differently in the acquisition process
About our guests:
Michael Gao, MD, the CEO and co-founder of SmarterDx. Prior to founding SmarterDx, Dr. Gao was the Medical Director for Transformation at NewYork-Presbyterian, where he led applied AI development, implementation, and strategy for the health system. Dr. Gao holds faculty positions at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Weill Cornell Medicine. Dr. Gao completed his internship and residency in Internal Medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian.. He received his M.D. from the University of Michigan and a B.S from the University of California Los Angeles.
Josh Geleris, MD, is the Head of Product and co-founder of SmarterDx. Prior to SmarterDx, he was Assistant Professor of Medicine at Columbia University, where he was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense for clinical informatics and data science, and led implementation of Epic for providers. Dr. Geleris completed his MD at the Technion-Israeli Institute of Technology and his Internal Medicine internship and residency at NewYork-Presbyterian.
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