Bringing the Hippocratic Oath into the venture capital world [PODCAST]

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“When I came into the business world, I saw a huge spectrum of ethics and am still shocked at how there aren’t any standards. Why must one be in a professional career only to have some guidelines and/or rules to follow? I don’t currently have patients in the entrepreneurial world, but I do have a lot of people in my sphere with whom I have the ability to educate and empower. I am bringing the Hippocratic Oath into the field of venture capital and entrepreneurship in an effort to impact the world on a different but equally important scale.”

Navin Goyal is a physician-entrepreneur and author of Physician Underdog.

He shares his story and discusses his KevinMD article, “Bringing the Hippocratic Oath into the field of venture capital and entrepreneurship.”

Reflect and earn 1.0 AMA PRA Category 1 CME for this episode.

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Hosted by Kevin Pho, MD, The Podcast by KevinMD shares the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from.

Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. My name is Kevin Pho, founder and editor of KevinMD. Today on the show, we have Navin Goyal. He is a physician-entrepreneur, and he’s the author of the book Physician Underdog. There’s an excerpt from that book on KevinMD titled “Bringing the Hippocratic Oath into the field of venture capital and entrepreneurship.” Navin, welcome to the show.

Navin Goyal: Thank you very much for having me.

Kevin Pho: So we’ll get into your excerpt and book in a little bit, but first off, can you share your story and journey to where you are today?

Navin Goyal: Yeah. So I wanted to be a physician, like many people did. I was lucky to get into medical school and trained in anesthesiology in Chicago. I ended up going into private practice in Columbus, Ohio, where I reside right now. It was a dream job. I practiced for 13 years, and probably in the middle, several years into the job, I started getting a little bit bored. After you’re done with board exams, the learning curve of private practice, or I should just say practicing on your own, starts to go a little bit lower and flat. Boring is good in medicine, but boring is still boring.

So I started reading and learning about different businesses, investing, and entrepreneurship. I just started really exploring the world outside of medicine and ended up co-founding a company in 2014 called SmileMD, which is a mobile anesthesia company that enables procedures in dental practices and physician offices. So that got our feet wet and basically motivated me to learn more. As I got more inundated in entrepreneurship, I realized that you can really solve problems on your own. You can create different aspects to do it, and it doesn’t have to be within the confines of a medical system, which many of us know is highly regulated and, let’s call it, antiquated.

So, keeping the movement forward, I ended up meeting a lot of entrepreneurs, learning from them, and realizing that they needed funding to keep moving forward. My two co-founders of SmileMD and I were fortunate enough to self-fund initially, and so we weren’t really thinking about that as top of mind. But as I met other entrepreneurs, and they were doing great things, funding was a big deal. So a co-founder of LOUD Capital and I, at the time, in 2015, started an angel fund to help invest in these entrepreneurs. Many physicians and other folks around me were very interested in investing in something new. They knew I had started a company, and they knew I was investing personally. And so that became something greater than a fund. It became more of a company, a firm, and it’s called LOUD Capital, which I run now full time here in 2022.

I left my medical practice in 2019. So after 13 years of practicing anesthesiology, I ended up running LOUD Capital full time as CEO, where we do a lot of impact investing and also impact building, and I’m sure we’ll get a little bit more into that.

Kevin Pho: So just to be clear, did you have any formal training in entrepreneurship, business, or venture capital, or is this something completely self-taught or learned from mentors?

Navin Goyal: Proudly, no formal training, and I’m actually proud of that, because I think a lot of people can learn what they need to in order to move into different industries. When we’re talking specifically about our physician community, we’ve already proven to ourselves that we can learn a lot, do rote memorization, and work crazy hours. So if you put that energy and intention and real interest into a new subject, you can learn it.

With entrepreneurship, there’s no road map. There are books, but in the end, you have to make a lot of decisions and be comfortable knowing that the unknown is ahead. So it’s betting on yourself. It’s having that intention, reminding yourself that you intend to do good, and you learn and you keep moving forward. And that’s what I realized from other entrepreneurs, that this world is very different from what many of us have trained in, in the medical field.

Kevin Pho: So I always like to ask this question to physicians who moved on to different fields: Has being a doctor helped or hurt you now as a venture capitalist?

Navin Goyal: It’s probably done both. Initially, it was people saying, “Hey, you’re a doctor, stay in your lane. What do you know about this?” Those were some of the conversations. And there have been plenty of people who tell me, “Hey, you don’t speak like a doctor.” If you really think about that, it’s really insulting, because it’s like, OK, what does a doctor sound like? I think there’s that philosophy going around that they’re referring to, that we don’t really know a lot outside of the medical world.

On the other hand, which I actually want people to focus on and leverage, we do have our degree. We do have an industry or career that is known to help people, and it’s very competitive, so people know that you have a certain level of intelligence, or at least worked really hard to get there. What that can do is open up doors. It can increase credibility a lot quicker and build trust a lot quicker. And it’s those couple of points that I really like to point out to our physician colleagues, or health care colleagues, to start leveraging to open up doors for themselves.

Kevin Pho: All right, let’s talk about your book and the excerpt from KevinMD. Your book is titled Physician Underdog. The excerpt is titled “Bringing the Hippocratic Oath into the field of venture capital and entrepreneurship.” Now, for those who didn’t get a chance to read your excerpt, can you just walk my audience through it and share the story of why you decided to share that particular one?

Navin Goyal: Yeah. So when you look at the investment industry, and look at the venture capital industry, it’s the Wild West. There’s a lot of money, and there are a lot of players. What I saw, from a fresh set of eyes, is that there’s a lot of focus and money going towards random stuff. Sometimes it’s just to make money, taking money from one person or one company and just bringing it to the other, and that’s considered success. What I see is the opportunity to bring money, time, and resources into true problem-solving, right? Entrepreneurship is many times solving problems. In the venture world, sometimes it’s just switching hands with money. And so how can we, as an investment firm, invest in people actually solving problems, to make money but actually impacting society?

And I think coming from the physician world, having the Hippocratic Oath, right, when we go to a hospital or a medical center, there’s not really a question in the culture of, are we here for the patient? But when you’re in the investment world, you’re like, what are we here for? We’re here to just make money, and there’s plenty of that. So how can we bring, from a physician foundation, that intention to help people, but with a different vehicle of investing? And that’s kind of the premise of how I look at the opportunity for physicians.

Kevin Pho: So how do you go about doing that? How do you choose what to invest in, and how do you take your background with the Hippocratic Oath into the venture capital world and into choosing the projects that you invest in?

Navin Goyal: Yeah. So when you look at purpose-driven companies and purpose-driven entrepreneurs, a lot of it is aligning with the people you invest in, to know that their intention is very similar to yours. There are a lot of people out there, but you do have to screen it out. There are people who just want to make money and sell their company, and there are people who actually want to solve a problem and build a business model around it to make money and sell their company. There’s a difference. So it’s screening that out.

Over time, and it’s 2022 right now, we’ve invested in over 60 different companies. I would say the majority of them, and early on we were trying to figure out our thesis, the majority of them are purpose-driven. The majority of them are solving a real problem and helping society.

And so when I’m a physician working in a hospital or a medical center, I’m seeing one patient at a time, and I’m doing my impact with that person. But what if you can impact the community that they’re around? You can impact their employment. You can impact their nutrition. All these other things that really take this community aspect are some of the things that we look at with regard to the investment side.

Kevin Pho: So I’ve had a few physician-entrepreneurs on the show. Now, can you give some tips on how they can pitch venture capitalists like yourself? What are some common mistakes that they make, or what are some things that they can do to improve the success of their pitches?

Navin Goyal: Yeah, to improve the success of their pitches, everyone always wants a template: How should I present? How should I communicate this? And communication is very important. But if you are actually solving problems, number one is educating on the problem, because many people don’t know how many problems there are. There are very simple things, pain points. So it’s education, and then it’s just pursuing your why. Why do you care that much? Is it because you saw a problem to be solved and this is opportunistic? And that’s OK, taking advantage of an opportunity.

But in the end, what I really look for is digging deep. The entrepreneurial journey is very challenging. You’re going to get kicked in the gut many times. You’re going to question yourself daily. I do question myself daily. I’m like, “Am I doing this?” It’s about continuing to move forward. So it really challenges the deep intention to move forward.

It’s not that different from when we were going to medical school, right? There were some folks in my class who, a year into it, said, “You know, my parents were really pushing me to go here, but I don’t want to be here.” And they didn’t end up continuing on. That’s not surprising, because when there are going to be huge obstacles and challenges, it really goes down to your core, why you are here. So in the end, before you present, before you talk to anybody, know why you’re there, and that’s going to come out in your presentation.

Kevin Pho: All right, let’s talk about your book, Physician Underdog. What are some of the main messages that you want the audience to come away with?

Navin Goyal: So the subtitle of it is “Leveraging the Underdog Mentality to Move Forward.” And so it’s about, really, I’m a physician underdog, and what I’ve done with my own life. There are a lot of other physicians out there, but this is really for anybody who’s dealt with adversity, and it’s what you can do in your mindset to shift, to move forward. And so I give specific examples in the book of what I’ve gone through, how we started SmileMD, how we started LOUD, what I look at right now, and all the people that reach out to me and say, “I’m about to do a career change,” or, “I’m dealing with this adversity.”

It’s called Physician Underdog because when you look at an underdog, many times initially it’s like, they’re going to lose this because they don’t have this, or the other person has this. But they were talking about a game and sports. And so there are qualities in an underdog, even just knowing you’re an underdog, that can be motivation and fuel. Now, sometimes it deflates people or takes away energy. For me, being an underdog, I realized, actually fuels me and motivates me, and I thrive under stress.

Now, everyone doesn’t need to be that way. But does adversity always need to be negative? Does it always need to be something like, “Gosh, I’ve got to get this adversity away”? It’s taking the situation, looking deep inside you at the traits that can overcome your adversity, and being better off, learning, and continuously just being the best version of yourself.

Kevin Pho: Now, in your own journey, when you transitioned from anesthesiology to being a venture capitalist, did anyone doubt that path? Did anyone ask you, “You spent this long doing medicine, residency, private practice. What are you doing? You have a great life. Why are you taking these chances?” Talk about some of the doubt that you may have faced during that transition, and how did you overcome it?

Navin Goyal: Yeah. Number one, I had doubt myself. I had guilt. Number one, I was like, why am I even thinking about looking over here when I trained so hard to be in my dream career and job? I mean, a dream, nothing negative on that end. But my mindset had changed, and I said, I have one life right now that I know about, and so I need to make sure I’m the most fulfilled and happy that I can be. And I realized that overcame what I thought society wanted for me.

So once I was comfortable in my own skin, then the next level was, yes, there were very close friends who were concerned: “Are you sure you’re going to leave this great group and go over here?” Two things. Number one, I said, “I’ve thought about it. You know me as a responsible person, not just doing a last-minute thing. It was a hard enough journey for me to get in here. I’ve really thought about it.” I took my time growing the businesses, five, six years.

And then the second thing is, you know, a physician can go back and utilize their skills if they needed to. How many people can say that? And so it’s leveraging that degree that you earned, that you rightfully deserve, and being able to go back if you need to feed your family, if you needed to do something. So I leveraged that point. I encourage other people not to make radical movements. But when you’re starting to question yourself, imagine someone without a degree like that, who can’t go back, and yet they still take risks. And so I was inspired by people with much less of a net to fall back on, who were still moving forward because they were so convinced that they could do something. So I just encourage people to think about those things as they’re making decisions.

Kevin Pho: If you were to do this journey all over again, is there anything that you would do differently?

Navin Goyal: The only thing I would change that I can really think about is my undergraduate degree. I did my undergraduate degree at Ohio State University, and someone told me, “Hey, make sure you do this crazy-tough major to get into medical school.” So I did molecular genetics. Man, that was boring. I still don’t know what molecular genetics is. I would go there, and it probably negatively affected my GPA. I fortunately still got into medical school, but I saw it as a missed opportunity when I look back.

And I actually talked to a lot of med students, residents, and high school students, and I just say, “Learn. Do it for yourself. Don’t do it for a resume or to get into the next step, because in the end, you are here, and you can be a sponge in what you’re motivated to do, whether it’s psychology or something in the arts, something completely different, business. Learn it, embrace it, and that’s going to make you better wherever you go.” So that’s my only regret, but I don’t lose sleep over it. I just like to make sure I tell people that.

Kevin Pho: Yeah, I think that’s a great point. We have to remember that pre-med is actually not a major, and we have so many different ways that we can go to medical school. Like you mentioned, economics, business, the humanities. There are so many other ways to get into medical school other than the sciences. So that’s a great point.

We’re talking to Navin Goyal. He is a physician-entrepreneur, and he’s the author of the book Physician Underdog. So, for those physicians interested in making a similar career transition like yourself, going into entrepreneurship or even venture capital, what kind of advice do you have for them if they’re interested in making that transition?

Navin Goyal: Yeah, I would say, just like I did, just be a sponge. Learn, explore, and talk to a lot of people. I think there’s an undervalued emphasis on talking to people, reaching out to people, asking about their journey, asking what they did. And that’s why I’m such an open book with regard to saying I just learned things as I went along. All the information in today’s world is available.

And it’s actually a reason why I wrote the book, because I get a lot of people that reach out from around the world asking about the story. So the story is in there, everything. But it’s not just my book, right? There are other books, there are online courses, there’s social media, there’s great sharing of experiences of how I went from A to Z. It’s what you do on a daily basis, right? And do podcasts and a lot of content. And I just think, be a sponge. You’ve already proven yourself to be able to learn, so now it’s time. If you have interest, go learn it and go do it.

Kevin Pho: And my final question: What are some of your take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience?

Navin Goyal: I would say this: Society puts a structure on us, and it’s really time to unravel and unlearn that. Do what you need to in order to fulfill yourself, and that fulfillment of yourself will positively impact the people around you. So if everyone was fulfilled on this earth, the world would be a much better place, a healthier place, and a happier place. And so it’s just, do what you need to do for optimizing yourself. There are many ways to do that, but if you think about it that way, I think you have a few steps to do well.

Kevin Pho: Well, thank you so much for sharing your story, time, and insight, and thanks again for being on the show.

Navin Goyal: Thank you very much.

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