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The next great founder may be hiding in healthcare
Business & Technology
Fast CompanyEN
October 30, 2026

The next great founder may be hiding in healthcare

Academic medical centers and universities produce groundbreaking research every day. An autism researcher who builds an AI game to clinically improve behavioral problems. A basic scientist who discovers how the environment of tumors impacts treatment. An electrical engineer who nano-sized a method for magnets to image the body. An MBA who teamed up with two MDs to create a novel approach to solving complex pediatric cardiac cases. And all are at risk of remaining stuck in the ivory tower. Venture capital is great at finding founders who tell a compelling story with confidence, but the best founders may not innately exhibit those traits. This is particularly true in healthcare, where physicians, researchers, PhDs, and faculty members often have the deep technical understanding and firsthand experience needed to build the next great company. These scientists and clinicians are knee-deep in the problems they’re trying to solve. They’ve seen where existing approaches fall short, often for years, and have developed ideas for how to do things differently. But getting those ideas into the market requires a different set of skills. They need to learn how to test the market hypothesis, not just the scientific hypothesis. Today, there are researchers and scientists developing promising healthcare innovations who aren’t thinking about building a company. And if they are, many show up to pitch venture capitalists with presentations better suited for an academic keynote or scientific meeting. Slides dense in technical detail, with little market analysis or validation, and without much of a story. It’s not surprising that many VCs pass. But how many promising ideas are we missing because the people behind them haven’t learned how to pitch? Our experience We’ve seen this firsthand, over and over again. And it’s made us rethink what it actually means to invest early. Funds have competed for years to get into the best deals as early as possible. But in healthcare, getting in early may mean investing before there’s even a company. Before there’s a pitch deck, a business model, or a founder who has fully embraced the idea of becoming an entrepreneur. This is the idea behind inception investing. Rather than starting with a company and evaluating whether it’s worth backing, the starting point is a person who is particularly well suited to solving a problem. That might be a clinician or researcher with decades of experience and a scientific approach that hasn’t yet been commercialized. Or it might be someone whose personal experience with the healthcare system has led them to become deeply focused on a problem that others have overlooked. In either case, there may be no company yet. The market might not be defined. The founder might not know how to tell a compelling story. But those aren’t necessarily reasons to walk away. At Treehub, we’ve found that the qualities we’re looking for in these early conversations are often different from what a traditional investor might prioritize. We’re less concerned with whether someone can deliver a polished pitch and more interested in whether they understand a problem well enough to build something that hasn’t existed before. More than just science Of course, scientific expertise alone doesn’t make a successful founder. There still needs to be a market for the solution, a viable business model, and a path to getting it into patients’ hands. And not every researcher wants to build a company. But those are questions worth exploring with someone who has spent years developing a potentially important solution, rather than reasons to dismiss them at the outset. A scientist can learn how to evaluate a market. A physician can find a commercial partner. A researcher can learn how to tell a story that resonates with investors. The experience that led them to the idea in the first place is much harder to replicate. If we want more of the research coming out of universities and academic medical centers to reach patients, we need to get better at identifying the people behind it and helping them figure out what comes next. The next great healthcare company may not exist yet. And the person who will build it may still be thinking of themselves as a scientist, physician, or researcher rather than a founder. That’s exactly why we should be looking for them now.

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Curated from Fast Company. Classified as Business & Technology by AI, which sometimes makes mistakes.

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