From NHS Doctor to Million-Dollar Health Tech CEO: The SomX Story

I was like, why doesn't this work?

You obviously were not happy to just let things go.

I was better at treating the system than treating patients. Like generally that's, that's what I was drawn to.

Being able to understand that two things can be right.

I've always had within me the ability to, to know fully the two things can be true at the same time.

I think I agree with that. So lovely to have you, James. And again, like I was saying, I'm loving the studio, loving the bit of a mystery dark in the background. And thanks for jumping on the podcast with me.

You're very welcome, mate. You're very welcome. It's funny that you say studio. Everyone thinks this is like a full studio. If you, if you are watching this on video. It does. It definitely looks like I'm in a studio, but sometimes I'll like, I'll put people on my phone camera and I'll show you that like this is only panel to where you can see. So the rest of the room is this like horrible yellow color that like, it's just, it's somewhere between yellow and green. It's not, it's not, it's not. It's not a very good part of the color palette, to be honest. But it's. Yeah, the rest of the room looks like that. It's complete mess. But you can see. Looks good, I suppose.

Yeah. I mean it's 2024. This is health content creation in 2020. Should have my little one out there and then having.

Absolutely, yeah, we can definitely talk about that.

Well, yeah, I've got a hundred questions to ask you, but I suppose because we've got limited time, I'm just going to jump straight to it. If you join us today, I've got a very interesting, very impressive guest, James X. His full name is James Summer and he's the CEO of Somex, which is a health tech media company, I'll say is one of the leading, I don't know too many others, one of the leading health tech media companies in UK and Europe and you do great work. So welcome to the Money Wise Doctor podcast.

Thank you, man. Yeah, delighted to be here. Thank you for having me.

Lovely. Before the cameras or maybe the audience that they're rolling, I was about to get some details and I thought, no, save it for the cameras. And your CEO of Cemex is a real company. It's not just on LinkedIn and it's not just online.

That shows how much you work with startups, man, that you have to be cynical. If it's even a real company. Yeah. That speaks to a lot of people before they've incorporated. Do you?

So, yeah, you sort of making me want to jump into it straight away now when you talk about startups. But yeah, it's a real company, real people with real wages and salaries, doing real work and making a real difference. That's amazing what you've built and from the scratch and congratulations.

Well, thank you, man. Yeah, it's. Yeah, it's no mean feat. It's hard building a real thing with real people, real wages. You're right. Yeah. And it's funny because you get. You get all these functions creep in that once upon a time took you five minutes to reconcile your invoices or, you know, chat to the accountants about the annual accounts, like the work, really that many transactions, so there's not really any accounts to really talk about. Whereas. Whereas now actually, yeah, you know, we. We do, you know, about a million in revenue a year and. Nice. There's a lot of more money, more problems, mate, is all I could say.

More complexity that it is about.

It is a bit more complex. Yeah, that's.

That's grand. That's amazing. I mean, having come to that point, one of the things I admire, basically, we've got a lot of doctors who've come on the podcast and it's really quite interesting and impressive to see a doctor who's been able to shift from traditional medicine and going to some other area. I know I've mentioned you've got a real company. So the big question I want to start with, James, is are you a real doctor?

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I would say not anymore. That's probably the most accurate way of saying it. Yeah, so I was an anesthetics and Intensive care doctor. So I got to the end of core anesthetic training. Um, and it was at the end of. It was at the end of core training that I made my exit, basically.

Wow. Wow.

Um, yeah, so. So I went to medical school in Nottingham, did my F1, F2 in London. Yeah, nice. Did my one F2 in London and yeah, then went up to or lived in Liverpool. But actually divine aesthetics training in North Wales Hospital called Wrexham, which was. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun those two years. Liverpool's an incredible place to live for any of your listeners that have ever been there or gone on a night out there, maybe Liverpool is crazy.

Like the ultimate club in city.

Oh, special place, Special place in my heart for, for Liverpool forever because of those, those couple of years. But yeah, then, then I guess you could say my ambition got the better of me and, and I found my way back to London. Worked in policy for a couple of years, went to Health Education England, went to NHS England. I'd worked at the BMJ previously as well. And then yeah, started working at the Digital Health London accelerator, helping a load of startups. Started my own accelerator after that with a guy called Alex. We did that for a few cohorts, was raising a fund so we were going to become VCs. And then that got. I mean Covid really punched that in the face. But ultimately I think we both fell out of love with the idea anyway in the meantime. So yeah, it's funny how some things work out like that, but at the same time, yeah, I had the idea of some X. I was working with so many different startups.

Yeah.

Through the accelerators they all seem to have the same problem, which was communications, marketing, PR support. With those agencies not being specialized in health tech and biotech and therefore not understanding the language. What we hear from people all the time is like we have to teach them about health tech for six months and then spend six months watching them under deliver. And then I'm 12 months out of pocket and I've got far less budget and I still need to solve the problem. So yeah, it was, it was fortunate. You know, I was doing a lot of my own content, obviously had the podcast, starting the newsletter, like, you know, writing a lot on LinkedIn and obviously for Forbes at the time as well, I was writing for. And so I was creating a lot of content and so from a content perspective, that was great. And then my girlfriend at the time, now wife Jess. Yeah, yeah, was in press and pr, a global agency for big medical Device, big pharma clients. And so the two of us basically put our heads together and said, hey, there's definitely, there's definitely a business here and you know, working with startups quite a lot, you know, I had quite a high bar for what a good idea was and I really tried and tested this idea with people because I was like, I don't want to, I don't want to have like this long list of failed businesses behind me. I certainly don't want to raise any money and put myself in that situation because I, you know, whilst being an entrepreneur I'm actually quite risk averse if anything. So I didn't want to. I never felt comfortable raising money to build something that might or might not work. I didn't ever that for me personally it doesn't seem like a good idea but for plenty it does and for plenty it does work and you know, create a fantastic life doing that sort of stuff. But it just wouldn't have floated my boat. So.

Wow.

Yeah, the services business, you know, revenue and profit from day one was really appealing and so idea together and. Yeah, exactly. Bootstrapped it put the idea together and fortunately, you know, obviously having a network of client of potential clients, I could ask a lot of them like, hey, would you, would you come in for this amount if we did this thing for you? Heavily discount it. Just give me loads of feedback. Four people said yes, so we launched and yeah, the rest is history. But yeah, growing a business is a whole nother one that I can talk for you for a few hours about. But that's how it all started, man. That's how it all started.

We've only got a few minutes into the podcast and I feel like you've already dropped a master class here, James.

I don't know, I don't know. That's just the history month.

There's so much to unpack here and I feel like I've already gotten the promise of the podcast. The reward already. First of all, shout out to University of Nottingham, my first home in the uk. I did my Masters and I held. I think it's great. I mean all the Cambridge and Oxford, they're fantastic. Not taking nothing away from them but I seem to be getting. All the innovators seem to be coming from University of Nottingham. I wonder if there's anything on campus. I know I've had a few of my podcasts. The most recent was Abena, she's been in as well. Yeah, shout out to Nottingham and fantastic work you and Jess are doing basically. I'll just start from one way. You mentioned entrepreneurs being you're an entrepreneur but you're risk adverse. I think a lot of times if you're not raising money, bootstrapping, then every penny matters, every dollar matters. And beyond the penny and the dollar, basically your time as well. Yeah, you're. I think you're about the same age now. You're 38. You look young for that age. Actually.

That'S my skincare routine. We could talk about that as well. Get ready with me. Etc.

All right, maybe, maybe that might be an opportunity for a business. Maybe skin analytics or something like that. Yeah, but, but yeah, you're looking good for 38, but basically you found an idea. But answering my first question, you were already working as a doctor. Not just a doctor, but a doctor doctor. You've gone to the end of your culturing anesthetics so you're quite deep in it. But sort of like what led you to start thinking outside the box? Basically you're like an OG in health tech now. You've been doing it for a long time. Even before it was popular. I think I'm the only doctor that knows health tech. But even before it was so popular, what led you to think, well, rather than just finish, become an aesthetic consultant can inquire good money. What was the driving force? What was the real motive behind it?

Great question for me. I got here through quality improvement projects. Well, yeah, exactly. Qis or quips like all that sort of stuff. So what it was the first job that I had was I was an F1 and it was liaison psychiatry. That was my first job. Which basically means for those that don't know, you are the like in house psychiatrist to a hospital. So you sort of run around the medical and surgical patients on the wards and you give I guess how you describe like ambulatory psychiatry advice and, and stuff and prescriptions or whatever. So you see a lot of delirium, you see a lot of anxiety, depression, you see some psychosis. So it was quite interesting from that regard, but it wasn't that busy. So I had a lot of time just sat in the psychiatry office just waiting for these kind of referrals to go in. Because you don't have inpatients and you don't have like an exhaustive list of like diagnostic tests or anything like that. Broadly you go and see someone, it takes, you know, can take a couple or a few hours once you do see them and try and get all the information on them. But so much time just sort of sat wandering the corridors of the. Of the hospital, really. Just like chatting to my fellow F1s and, you know, help sticking in the odd cannula where I can just to keep my skills up. Even though I was petrified of doing that by the end of my liaison psychiatry rotation anyway, I had a lot of time so I could get a sense of, like, how the hospital ran because I would see a lot of the different F1s and like all the different departments and yeah, the way I. Way my brain works is that I do sort of see and I feel things in shapes and weird sort of abstract nature, so I could sort of sense and feel almost palpably like where these hearts of the hospital were that weren't really working that well.

Yeah.

And so a really obvious one was we just had loads and loads and loads of discharge summaries just piling up in the doctor's mess for just discharges that happened. So again, people don't know. Once you get discharged from hospital, your notes at this hospital anyway got sent to the doctor's mess. A doctor would then just have to read the notes, figure out what happened, write a letter to the GP in a form and then that goes off, that goes, so the GP knows why you got discharged anyway, these people getting discharged. And weeks and weeks and weeks was going by and these discharge summaries weren't being done. So the gps were getting really angry. They were phoning in, being like, where. Where on earth is this stuff? And so I wanted to solve this problem because by this point I'm now on MAU. I'm actually the F1 that's writing the most amount of discharge summary. So now this is really my problem and I'm like, this is just the sticking point of the whole system. This is the link between the hospital and community care. This GPS not knowing what's going on, there's medication changes, there's reasons for things that have happened that they just now don't know. So I can just feel this tension of, like, the whole healthcare system is just way worse because of this massive pile of discharge summaries that reaches the ceiling. So I was like, why doesn't this work? And so it's because the computer takes seven and a half minutes to load when you turn it on. So no one wants to turn the computer. No, exactly. Of course, you know, and it's funny that you. It's interesting that you laugh, right? It is funny, like crazy reality. This is. Yeah, there's a. There's a. There's a harsh reality to, like, why problems actually are what they are in a hospital. And a computer that takes seven and a half minutes to load once you turn it on is a real serious issue because nobody wants. Nobody wants to turn the computer on. Once it's on, it's slow. Once you, Once you load up the discharge summary form, it has loads of information that's completely superfluous and just isn't needed. Like, we had to do a whole page for heart failure. Even if the patient was normal, we had to fill in. Or like the. Or just all these, like, random, like, metrics, all the blood results have to go in, like, all this sort of stuff. And me just thinking, like, how on earth do I solve this problem? Like, I ended up speaking to GP, I rang a few GPs and I was like, what do you actually want to know? And they're like, really? All we need to know is what they came in with, what they went out with and if there's any medication changes and why. It was like, well, cool. Can all this just be replaced by, like a white box? It was like, yes, right, now we're getting somewhere. So got in a room, a few different people like it, some consultants, some F1s, some, you know, just some people from the hospitals, got everyone in a room and a couple of gps and.

Just said, you, obviously we're not happy to just let things go.

Oh, yeah. With a bone. Yeah, yeah. So. So tenacious, like, to solve these problems. Yeah. So.

So why you said we got a few people in the room, what does that mean? You were a junior doctor then. Well, resident doctor now. You're like F1, F2 then. Obviously not the most powerful person in the team, but.

No, no, no, no, no.

In a position to drive change. Because you were curious. Yeah, but the spiffle in the group.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think anyone that achieves anything never does it alone. And I think that's the thing. You have to find people that are going to help you, either with introductions or with leverage or with just however you can get help. Right. At the time, I had a consultant on MAU that was really bought into solving this problem. So what it was is that whenever I, you know, what was going to solve this problem was essentially getting all the, all the relatively senior people in the room to just listen to the gps who need. Who. Who would say the same thing and said to me, just a white box space with these three things in it. That's all we want, that's all we need. But you also need the IT person there to be able to then Go. Cool. Can you just execute on that, please? Yeah, fine. You also need the consultants to be like, yeah, okay, we're happy with that as well. So you sort of need buying from people. That's what my consultant may you gave me. So he was sort of bought into solving this problem, was happy to use his name and his leverage in order to then make this happen. Because you're absolutely. One of the most common feelings for me as an F1 was just the powerlessness. Yeah. The nature of feeling, like just feeling so powerless, but also being the most connected person on the ground floor to notice what needs solving other than like other allied health professionals who also put hands on patients and are on the ground floor, who also have, by the way, a pretty flawless knowledge of like what should actually change and why. Which is why again, strength in numbers, bottom up demand. Like the more of those people that you can get on board with you that have that put hands on patients as well. Like ideal. Because together you can be a serious force and you know, the many against the few to get things done. Like all of that, all of that sort of stuff rings true. So yeah, that's that. That's the sort of stuff that is. So I would take quality improvement projects, but then I'd push them to like a business case because I'd actually want something to happen. I would never do policy improvement projects that just sat on a shelf that just didn't interest me. And so the best thing that I did ever, I've told this story a few times, but, like the best thing that I ever did was follow a blood culture to see what happens to it.

Okay.

I was on neonates. Yeah, Fantastic job. Yeah, I was on. Yeah, I was, I was the, I guess the one of the F2s. So you're, you know, you're the youngest of the SHOs. You're not really an SHO. Yeah. So it's, it's a, it's an interesting time. Anyway, used to do this ward round on special care, which was on a Friday. You basically have to go around all the babies that were born overnight with suspected sepsis. So if they might have had an infection, that's because there was meconium at birth or difficult delivery or cord around the neck. Like whatever it is that contributed to this picture that, oh, this baby might be septic. So they have blood cultures taken at birth and then your home at the time. Anyway, I think nice guidance has changed now, but at the time you'd have 48 hours of antibiotics home if cultures were negative. So home if you blood, if your blood tests, okay, the blood test would never come back after 40 hours. So what I did was on a day that the pods were down, which is like the shoots that shoot the blood through the hospital, I just follow, I just followed a blood culture to see like what happens to it. So the guy picked it up, took it to the lab, knocked on the lab door like, hey, what happens to these blood cultures overnight? Why are these, why are some of these coming back on time? Why are some of them not like, what's going on? And they said, hey, well it's because overnight 5:01pm basically all the pods drop into a basket and then they just accumulate all the way overnight. So the baby born at 8:59am theirs goes on the top. Now the way that we incubate those is that we take them from the top and then start working on them. So the poor baby that's born at 5:01pm is actually worse off. But the point is, is that they, you know, those ones, they've had 12 hours of not being anything done to them. So, yeah, anyway, wrote this business case, it was like, look, you actually shadowed someone in finance to learn how to write business case. And like there was this thing called the KSS School of Clinical Leadership at the time, which was amazing because I applied for this thing and they paired me with someone in finance, shadowed each other. So we learned stuff from each other. And that was amazing initiative. Incredible initiative. I don't think it exists anymore. Incredible initiative. Yeah. So then I worked with Linda who helped me write this business case. We wrote it together and, and basically said, you can courier the blood to the nearest place overnight, or you can lease a new blood culture analyzer, stick it on the neonates ward, put discharge dependent bloods in it. You'd save 90 grand in year one, 200 grand in year two in perpetuity. So that was a business case that we wrote. And again like it was so cool to like see this through, to like, hey, here's something that can solve the problem. Interesting thing though, like the clinical director pulled me aside and said, hey, this is fantastic. This is fantastic. I've got PhD students that you know, can't like do this sort of stuff. It's amazing. But the problem is I can't do it because I've got a half empty neonate unit and if I discharge people any quicker then it'll look bad and we'll lose money and all sorts of stuff. So loads of you learn about perverse incentives in the system. Crazy thing so it was like super interesting. But this in answer to your question, like originally, like, how did I get into all of this stuff? It was through this. I'd find a problem, I'd pull up the thread long enough to see what the potential solution was. And in this case, for example, it was a blood culture analyzer. So I'd end up speaking to blood. I mean, it didn't in this case, but like I'd speak to blood culture analyzer companies and then I'd, you know, learn what they would need to then get this deal done. And I'd then work both sides and say, hey, you've got this company coming in. Here's what I'd ask them. I'd work on this side, say, hey, you guys need to say this in the meeting. If you want it to work, you need to speak in bed days. And so I ended up as being this sort of communications consultant anyway for like some of the stuff that I was trying to do. But broadly I was just interested in tech, right? So I was reaching out to tech startups anyway, just asking them stuff and just learning things that way. But I would also just, you know, help out where I could say, hey, I've looked at your website, you might benefit from saying this on the website, like this is the way that we talk in the hospital about this problem. And so that side of things was always interesting to me. I was better at treating the system than treating patients. Like generally that's, that's what I was drawn to because I was just so frustrated because I was just spread so thin as a clinician that I couldn't deliver the standard of care that I wanted to. And that consistently frustrated me to a point where I'd then work even more so then try and change the system so that I'd need to work less. And this is the perverse thing with me, it's the same running a business and trying to optimize stuff in the business. I will work all night so that I don't have to repeat work or do extra work. So I end up, I mean I'm in this constant state of like working, working, working, working, working to this eventual magical made up day where all of this comes together and then everything runs autonomously, which is just. It's a false, It' false economy, mate. Honestly, it's false economy. But this is amazing growth.

I felt a little bit like I was drinking from a hose there. And I loved it. Look, let's start from purpose. I mean, not purpose, incentives. Basically what you've demonstrated clearly in the last couple of minutes is how entrepreneurs think, because lots of people, or lots of people I've talked to start a business or invest in their business, people think that entrepreneurs start a business because they really want to make money and obviously that's a good reward. That's capitalism. But a lot of times I see curiosity like a tread of curiosity. Everything you've described when I worked in psych, so I worked a bit in psych in London privately, when I was a student doing my Master's, I worked in priori and then I worked in psych doing my rotations as a gp. I just remember the computers that take forever to land. And then on the other side, as a solid gp, receiving discharge, summaries are like several pages long. I don't really care about this. I just want to see like five days. I've got 2,500 patients. So it's amazing that you've taken something like that that most people will sort of like overlook and then pull the thread and see where it's got to. I know you've mentioned something about optimizing, building in leverage and all that, because it seems like your approach has been find a problem, try to get to the bottom of a problem and then building some sort of incentive and leverage to make it work. Because you obviously mentioned you don't mind working all day, all night, because you're trying to build something, but all work is not equal. You're building something that could then do more work, which is like leverage and all that. So basically your entry into health tech and sort of like doing the communication bit, because obviously a lot of software programmers, engineers, they are builders, but they're not always the top communicators. Yeah. You still remember how you landed your first paying client. I mean, you've done a lot of free work already. From what you described for the NHS and outside the nhs, how did you land your first paying client?

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I can say my first paying gig in health tech, actually. So one of the best decisions that I ever made and one of the most lucky and fortunate I've ever been was when I applied to the FMLM's leadership scheme. At the time it was the Bruce Keough scheme. Yeah, it's the National Medical Director's Clinical Fellowship scheme. So I applied for that, I managed to get it and that took me to policy. So that took me, I got placed at Health Education England for a year and I worked, I worked there for a year and started to learn and understand the back end of healthcare. The arm's length bodies, the albs, the NHS England's, the Health Education England. But then also like, like, nice. And the CQC. And yeah, we had, there was like 30 fellows and they were, we were all across all of these things, right? And we had like a joint WhatsApp group and we'd have joint socials together and we'd meet up and we'd have these like dinners where we'd have like a big speaker that we'd say like, hey, where are these 30 doctors across all these places? Like, and we'd get like the head of the Civil Service and all this sort of stuff to come and do an after din a talk for us. And like it was, it was amazing. And so we would do like all of, all of this sort of stuff. Yeah. And because of that there was a, we all had a WhatsApp group. Someone just put in the WhatsApp group one day, like, because we're approaching the end of the fellowship, someone just put a job for the Digital Health London accelerator, right? They were looking for something called NHS Navigator. And so I looked at the job description, I was like, hey, it's pretty, it's pretty vague, it's pretty broad. Like I think I've got a decent skill set here and like applied for that. Got it. And I think that, that, that was when I was in Health tech because I was at an accelerator. And again, for those that don't know an accelerator is A program that supports startups. So in exchange for sometimes fees, sometimes equity, sometimes, like lots of things, but sometimes they're also free. This one was free, for example, because it was funded by NHS England and the European Union at the time. Yeah, the accelerator gives support, guidance, introductions. This on the other. Now you can, you, you can debate how useful these things are and they're useful for some and not others. Like, that's the harsh reality of it. And I think one of the problems with accelerators as well is that they're not a democracy because the startups on it are actually all in competition with each other for attention and whoever's doing the best is then going to get attention because that's going to deliver the. So there's problems with accelerators. But anyway, that was my first gig in health tech as an NHS navigator. I had 10 startups I looked after inverted commas and it was my job to make sure they got the most out of the accelerator. And like, like, I, I, although we were funded by NHS England and, and the European Union at the time, and we had metrics associated with, like, hours of support we gave to them and like research collaborations and all this stuff, I always considered it my role, I considered it my responsibility to be to the startups. So I always felt that, like, I always felt that they've applied, they've given their time and so I'm just going to make sure that whatever they want and need, I'm just going to try and do it. Whether it contributes these metrics, I'm not, I think, and I think that's what gave me a reputation of just being someone who just like, got things done or like tried at least, or whatever it was. And I think, I think that was observed. And so me and someone called Hannah, who was another navigator at the time, when Jenny, our boss and our maternity leave, we got promoted to run the program. So now we've got exposure to running accelerator, which is really interesting. You learn how to run it and you learn what the component parts are and you learn about leadership and you learn about the health innovation networks that were running at the time, the three in London. And so you got more of an understanding of that and how the whole, how the whole system fits together. Yeah. And then started my own accelerator after that, just, just by, you know, understanding the model and knowing where I think I can support, like not competing the component parts are. And you learn about leadership and you learn about the health innovation networks that were running at the time, the three in London. And so you've Got more of an understanding of that and how the whole, how the whole system fits together. Yeah. And then started my own accelerator after that. That just, just by, you know, understanding the model and knowing where I think I can support like not competing with that accelerator, but actually an earlier stage accelerator for individuals with ideas. Like an entrepreneur first for health tech is kind of what we did for three or four cohorts.

Wow.

So that's that, that's how that all kicked off. And then obviously from there you realize that the major problem is marketing. And then I flip into marketing and, and communications and so, and solve that quite specifically. But because of, of that history in terms of our first paying client, it was, it was as entrepreneurship goes and starting businesses goes, it was relatively straightforward.

Yeah.

I think this is, this is the thing with businesses is that very rarely does anyone. I think on my podcast of like 400 episodes, only one person has ever said there was a light bulb moment. Yeah, about 400 I've recorded like only one person. Only one person has ever said there was like a light bulb moment where just the light went off and it's like, I've got it. Everyone else has said they basically stared at the same problem for years and then eventually they're like, oh, maybe this thing might be it. And they iterate their way into something and then they keep iterating once they've started and then eventually they get to something. And I think that's the more that's the reality of it is that I've stared at the wall at this point for 10 years. Yeah, I know that. I, I've, I've known this problem with startups maybe for 4 or 5 or 6ish. And like, so it's that, that you. I develop. I saw the need and the gap over time. It wasn't like, hey, I know, like I've not doing anything else that I've just, oh, I've popped over here and realized there's like a need for a marketing agency, the communications agency. That's specific in health and biotech. That's not, it's not realistic. So to put, for entrepreneurs or people to put pressure on themselves for like the idea. You know, I'm going to sit at my desk and I'm going to think of, of the idea. Trust me, that's not where the ideas are. The ideas are within this web of messy nonsense that of problems that everyone has. And you need to pull that thread of that problem and just keep asking why, why is that a problem? Why is that an issue? And Then whatever they say, investigate that, investigate that, investigate that. And eventually get to the point where you're like, ah, it's because something is missing. And then you create that like that, that is essentially my guide. That's not the opposite to you know, like moment and gives you a bit, gives you a bit of inspiration, I guess, and just to take the pressure off yourself. Like you can't just sit around. You're not going to find the idea when you're not exploring. So yeah, that's, that's how it all started. So as I say, I already knew a lot of people. I knew people with the exact problem. I then was able to turn around to those exact people who had the exact problem, who I knew and just said, hey, I'm starting this thing. And then iterated with them what I thought the model should be in a very open forum. And that's how we got our first four clients. Like just four people initially said yes.

Wow, that is amazing. I mean I like is the non LinkedIn version, right? The LinkedIn version makes it look like I was just taking a walk. Like I was taking a walk this morning. And then it struck me like, eureka. I've got this bright idea. But you and I know it's often messy and if you, it's hard to come on, come upon something if you haven't actually been thinking about it.

I mean, health and science, man, especially biotech because like, look, health, second, biotech, like a huge, a huge thing is like tech transfer. So people go to, go to universities, they do academic research.

Yeah.

Which is quite literally staring at something for three years, four years, five years.

Yeah.

And then deciding, oh, this thing is gonna work, which we've just discovered. Okay, now let's try and commercialize it. Right? So it's, it's not as if there's just loads of just nascent ideas just knocking around. You're just gonna get into. No, no, no. These are like academic researchers that are searching specifically this one receptor or protein or whatever it is to figure out, oh, this, there might be something here. And then they discover. So that's a good analogy for it is that those people aren't just like thinking in their room and then all of a sudden they're like, ah, I wonder if. And then, you know, it's, it's not, it's not the reality of starting a business, it's the reality of having an idea. Maybe sometimes. But I would even argue that the ideas come through the exploration and actually going and doing and all that sort of stuff.

Yeah, absolutely. I think I agree with that. A lot of times requires a bit of messing about, iteration, testing it in the market. And for you, in your own situation, you were. You had the great, great opportunity, which you took to come out from being a clog in the system. Because that's the trouble a lot of doctors struggle with, right? They're working in a role, they're consultant or a GP or a registrar, and they can only see a little box. They're seeing what they're doing. And when they think about starting a business or leaving medicine to do something, sometimes they have the same type of thinking which you took.