#352 Lift the Shield — Adrian Dray & Kautham Haran

Two CareStack men, one origin story that starts in a Covid ward. Adrian Dray talks Payman through the lead-management deal that nearly bankrupted him, and how that near-miss set him up to bring an American cloud practice management system into a UK market that, by his own admission, "really dislikes change."

Kautham Haran, the ops brain to Adrian's front-of-house energy, explains how a fintech Start-Up background prepared him for the mess of onboarding whole dental groups onto new software. Between them they cover why CareStack bet big on a market the size of Oregon, what Rory Sutherland taught them about friction and the "doorman fallacy," and why AI receptionists might be dentistry's answer to the hoverboard fire hazard.

It's a conversation about building a company from scratch inside an industry built on habit, and what happens to your ego when the whole thing goes a bit public and a bit personal.

In This Episode

00:01:00 - Introductions00:01:35 - Covid and crisis00:07:25 - Meeting Abby00:11:25 - Kautham's fintech past00:14:15 - The leadership trio00:16:00 - Opportunity, defined00:23:10 - Cracking the UK00:31:55 - Straumann and strategy00:36:35 - Built-in payment plans00:39:55 - Onboarding challenges00:44:55 - Surprises in dentistry00:50:25 - Software's weak spot00:54:50 - Regulation as moat00:56:20 - Shaking up events01:03:55 - Rory's insights01:14:15 - Voice Stack AI01:17:45 - AI receptionist risks01:22:45 - Blackbox thinking01:32:25 - Fantasy dinner party01:40:55 - Closing thoughts

About Adrian Dray and Kautham Haran

Adrian Dray is director of demand generation at CareStack, a cloud-based dental practice management system, having previously worked as a data protection officer within dentistry.

Kautham Haran is CareStack's head of implementation, joining from a peer-to-peer invoice finance Start-Up he co-founded straight out of the University of Warwick. Together they lead CareStack's UK operation alongside Shamanth, their head of customer success.