Curology founder Dr. David Lortscher explains why physician-founded health companies outperform and how doctors can build or join high-impact startups.
Investors often say they won't back physician founders. Dr. David Lortscher, dermatologist, founder of Curology, and author of Why Doctors Win: The Doctors' Guide to Creating or Joining a High-Impact Startup, found the data says otherwise. Physicians founded just 17 percent of healthcare startups, yet they founded 51 percent of the most valuable healthcare companies, including Intuitive Surgical and Gilead. In this episode, Trevor Royce and Tim Showalter sit down with David to talk about what doctors bring to the table and what they still have to learn.
David takes us back to 2012, when his patients in rural New Mexico were driving two hours each way for appointments that didn't need to be in person. Rather than digitize the office visit, he rebuilt the whole care model. That meant full-time dermatologists, hundreds of keyboard shortcuts to make consults fast without losing quality, and a $20 monthly subscription that covered both care and medication. It also meant months in his kitchen teaching himself to compound acne creams that people would actually want on their faces. That work eventually became a 50,000 square foot compounding pharmacy in Pittsburgh. David is also candid about his biggest early mistake as CEO, which was underinvesting in marketing, and why doctors need to stop acting like the expert in the room once they join a startup.
The conversation then turns to the book's core framework: a great company needs a transformational product and a clear path to winning the market. David shows how that played out at Abridge, which launched a patient-facing app before building its AI scribe, and at Viz.ai, which won by building stroke detection into the clinical workflow and cut time to treatment dramatically. He also walks through a supplement idea he loved but ultimately walked away from, and shares practical ways physicians can find their way into startups, from incubators and MBAs to blogging, building apps, or taking a year to work inside a great company.
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