Serial entrepreneur David Shaikh — co-founder of Sherwood Sciences — joins the show to talk about building "impact startups," the €5.7M EU-funded app he's developing to diagnose skin neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) like leprosy and Buruli ulcer across Africa, and two decades of lessons learned from ticketing marketplaces to healthcare tech.

We dig into how deep convolutional neural networks are being trained on dermatologist-labeled images to help frontline health workers catch these diseases early, the challenges of building a bias-free, skin-tone-inclusive dataset across five African countries, and why the project will be fully open source and eventually handed to the WHO. David also opens up candidly about rejection, bootstrapping before chasing VC money, and how to find your "life mission" without burning out in your 20s.

Topics covered:

  • What makes a startup an "impact startup" vs. a traditional one
  • Inside the SkinNTD app: how AI-assisted diagnosis works for frontline health workers
  • Building a diverse, unbiased medical imaging dataset in Senegal, Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria & DRC
  • Why the app enhances doctors rather than replacing them
  • Raising non-dilutive funding through Horizon Europe and the WHO
  • Handling rejection, bootstrapping vs. VCs, and finding purpose in your 20s

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