The dispersal of medical equipment by the move to outpatient medicine has presented a huge opportunity for repeat founder Jinesh Patel. His startup, UptimeHealth, provides outsourced monitoring of the complex compliance requirements of equipment located at the proliferating outpatient facilities. UptimeHealth is also creating a marketplace for service technicians to reduce response times and costs. Jinesh’s affable manner and clear understanding of this promising market made this a delightful interview.
Highlights include:
Sal Daher’s Intro
Jinesh Patel’s Bio + Shoutout to Betsy Scherer of Venture Lane Startup Hub
What UptimeHealth Does and Why It’s Important
“So, we're finding healthcare facilities are not understanding the best way to manage compliance at, what we call a fragmented level.”
The Founding Story of UptimeHealth
Having Managed Medical Equipment Gave Jinesh the Ability to See the Opportunity Presented by the Shift to Outpatient Care that Created a Need for Outsourced Management and Compliance Support
Most Medical Devices Are Internet of Things-Enabled but that IoT Connection Is Off Due to Security Concerns
UptimeHealth’s First Product Is Basically a Digital Checklist of Equipment and Required Tasks
Parallels Between UptimeHealth, HomeBinder and Squadle; The Binder-Replacement Business
Connections Between UptimeHealth and Cohealo
Comparison with Meenta
“…we've created the industry's first marketplace for biomedical technicians to gain work and access to these outpatient healthcare facilities.”
“So, the uptime of your device has improved. The service response time has improved. The quality of customer service has improved.”
Why Jinesh Patel Came to Boston to Start UptimeHealth
Sal Talks About His Syndicates – Tells About His Investment in FineTune Learning
UptimeHealth’s Go-to-Market Strategy – Land & Expand
“…because we're the first people in this market doing exactly what we're doing it. There's no one who's paved a pathway to how to get this done. So, a lot of it is learning, trial balloon testing, A/B experimenting, whatever it looks like.”
“…, if we can predict who's going to need new equipment in the next year, we're now a sales engine for people selling medical equipment of the exact same category.”
Target Vision – How Jinesh Patel Fell into Entrepreneurship
“So, if you're both shooting at the same piece of paper, we can tell you who shot which bullet hole.”
"I'm young. There's a lot of time I have to correct whatever happens if it goes south."
“…I love entrepreneurship because every day is so different. Every challenge is a new strategy.”
Jinesh’s Concluding Thoughts
Of Advisors and Mentors Jinesh Says: “…the percentage of actual follow up was so high. I didn't understand like, "Oh, these are real people really trying to help."”
“There's a big difference between meaning to help and knowing how to help. I think that in the ecosystem here in Boston, there's a lot of practice on what do you do to help somebody when somebody asks you for this kind of help.”
Transcript of “UptimeHealth”
GUEST: CEO & CO-FOUNDER JINESH PATEL
Sal Daher’s Intro
SAL DAHER: Welcome to Angel Invest Boston. I'm your host, Sal Daher, an angel investor who delights in the fascinating tech companies being built in Boston's singular startup ecosystem. Because of the unique concentration of great universities here, Boston is a massive exporter of great startup ideas and a huge importer for capital. This idea-rich and capital poor-environment gives me the opportunity to invest early in the companies that will be changing our world, companies such as FineTune Learning. I'll tell you a bit more about fine FineTune later. Now I'd like to introduce my guest today, Jinesh Patel, Co-Founder and CEO of UptimeHealth. Jinesh, welcome to our studios.
JINESH PATEL: Thanks for having me, Sal.
Jinesh Patel’s Bio + Shoutout to Betsy Scherer of Venture Lane Startup Hub
SAL DAHER: Tremendous. Jinesh studied biomedical engineering and business at Texas A&M, then launched into a successful mini career in designing medical devices and equipment. He then started a company in a totally different area, an area that will we'll get one of my brothers very excited about this podcast, but we'll talk about that later. He then launched his current company UptimeHealth. Jinesh has built a tremendous reputation as a really resourceful and engaging builder of teams and devices. I think you'll find out from this interview just how engaging the person is. I connected with Jinesh through the good graces of the invaluable Betsy Scherer of Venture Lane Startup Hub, where Jinesh's company is based.
By the way, I'm looking forward to Venture Lane Startup Hub being the home of this podcast. It's a really energizing place to be and I hope the plans work out. Anyway, Jinesh, please tell us what UptimeHealth does and why it's important.
What UptimeHealth Does and Why It’s Important
JINESH PATEL: Sure. So UptimeHealth basically works with outpatient healthcare facilities. It's important because healthcare in the United States is shifting what we call an outpatient model of care. Traditionally, in the past, people used to go to big institutions like Mass General, Brigham and Women's to take care of their healthcare. Now you're starting to see urgent cares, surgical centers, freestanding imaging centers all pop up in local communities. What's that doing? It's creating a different kind of environment to operate in as well.
“So, we're finding healthcare facilities are not understanding the best way to manage compliance at, what we call a fragmented level.”
So, we're finding healthcare facilities are not understanding the best way to manage compliance at, what we call a fragmented level. They're also not understanding the best way to manage your medical equipment, and a lot of the other administrative things that usually were taken over by departments of big healthcare facilities.
SAL DAHER: Oh, okay. So like MGH, Mass General Hospitals is huge. It's the biggest employer in Massachusetts. It's a huge thing. In the hospital, they have a whole department for compliance, department for maintenance. But with these satellite organizations, it gets really expensive.
JINESH PATEL: Exactly, not only expensive but you lose a lot of the knowledge base that comes with having a department model. So, to give you an example of what we truly affect, and our bread and butter is medical equipment maintenance and management, as well as daily, weekly monthly compliance task management. In the big healthcare system, like going back to Mass General as example, they'll have a department called Clinical Engineering or Biomedical Engineering. That department just manages all the medical devices, making sure it's repaired, maintained, cleaned, whatever it takes to make sure it's up to good standards to provide quality care. They're experts in that. That's why they do that at a department level.
The doctors, nurses, administrators, they might know the device on how to use it, but not best practice for maintenance. Nowadays, when healthcare is predominantly provided by device, and then interpreted by doctors and nurses, it's really important to providing quality care as quality equipment. So, our goal is to make sure even at these smaller facilities, they have a tool or a resource, which is UptimeHealth. That'll tell them exactly how to manage that device for best practice and make sure it's providing quality care for all their patients.
SAL DAHER: Excellent. So, tell us the founding story. How UptimeHealth came about?
The Founding Story of UptimeHealth
JINESH PATEL: Sure. So, I used to be a Clinical Engineering Manager at the largest health care system in Austin, Texas. It's called Seaton and that's where I got to really learn how to manage equipment. What happens after the equipment is deployed in the actual facility? What happens then? I really didn't know before. As you mentioned, I've helped invent medical devices. I've been on that side of things, but I never really understood what happens after it's going into the care environment. That alone taught me everything that goes on behind the scenes, managing things, repairing things, how important that is to operations. For example, every time a medical device goes down, the healthcare facility has operational burdens. They have to re-triage patients. They lose revenue on billing for services on that device.
Having Managed Medical Equipment Gave Jinesh the Ability to See the Opportunity Presented by the Shift to Outpatient Care that Created a Need for Outsourced Management and Compliance Support
It's just a nightmare. That really got me interested in this whole world of operations on that side. After learning and being in that environment for so long, I started realizing this whole shift in the model of care to outpatient. As we started trying to help smaller facilities with this issue, I realized that there's a whole knowledge gap as to why it was important for them. They thought they were doing everything to compliance, doing everything correctly. But once you dug into it, they really didn't know what was going on.
So, I wanted to solve that with "Here's a software tool that automates what I do at a big system level and gives you at least that support structure that you wouldn't have otherwise." So that's really the reason I wanted to dig into it and get ahead of the game before this became an issue that no one could really solve.
SAL DAHER: So, you have some kind of software platform. Does this equipment have API's that you can address? How does it work?
JINESH PATEL: Yeah, so some devices are IoT enabled. But today, you won't find many of those devices actually turned on because there's cyber security issues, people aren't really trusting those devices at that level. So, what we do is we provide a little bit of a less sophisticated tool for now until people are more comfortable the IoT nature. And then we can turn on that feature of our product.
SAL DAHER: IoT, Internet of Things. Meaning each device, being on the internet and being accessible to the internet and so forth.
Most Medical Devices Are Internet of Things-Enabled but that IoT Connection Is Off Due to Security Concerns
JINESH PATEL: Right. Basically, what we do today is we go into a facility and we ask them, what equipment do you have? If they don't have that list, which a lot of these small facilities don't today... They keep it on pieces of paper, or it's maybe a list that they got when they first opened up their doors, and it's never been updated. We go in and help them understand what do you have in your facility? Makes, model, serial numbers. Where is it located in the building? What does a manufacturer require for it to be in good service? Is it a yearly maintenance check? Is it a quarterly maintenance check? We document all of that into our platform. Our platform then automates the communication between our clients and their vendors.
UptimeHealth’s First Product Is Basically a Digital Checklist of Equipment and Required Tasks
So, if they rely on a manufacturer to do all the service, because that's the contract that they got. We pre-communicate all that information to manufacturers, saying, "My client would like for you to come out next month because they're due for their service."
SAL DAHER: So, you're not actually getting into the devices, you're just kind of making sure that there's proper accounting for the devices and compliance with the requirements.
JINESH PATEL: Right. So that's the step we're taking today until people are more comfortable turning on-
SAL DAHER: Opening up.
JINESH PATEL: As soon as that happens, we'll flip our switch on our side that allows us to communicate directly to the devices. So, we have that little bit of a chicken and the egg problem with the technologies there. But no one's willing to adopt that yet, because security issues. So as a startup, we have to maneuver around that and figure out other ways just to provide value while everyone else is solving those bigger problems.
SAL DAHER: That is a just a massive problem, the security of IoT devices. That's why they have them all switched off. It's going to be for a long time. I think they just need to create a whole different layer, just a security layer. That is a standard, that is everywhere, and then people will feel comfortable switching it on. Because as it is right now, it's too labor intensive to actually create a secure access to these devices. These are like, there's so many of them. So, I think there's somebody somewhere is building some bit of software that's going to sit on top of all these devices, and will make that accessible.
JINESH PATEL: I think so. Then the other part what we do that's really helpful for these facilities is we help them manage these daily, weekly monthly compliance tasks that they have to do every morning. So, when you open up the doors of your healthcare facility, you probably have to wipe down all your countertops or machines, and you want to make sure somebody's done that. So, our platform is an automated task manager for those smaller items every morning day, week to make sure that people are opening up their doors and are compliant for that. We pre-assign those tasks based on how the manager wants to operate that day.
Because a lot of these facilities are very fragmented, there's maybe one manager for five small clinics. Instead of for them going everyday door to door, seeing through their paper binders, "Did that person check off that they've cleaned this? Did that person send out the spore sample for their sterilizer machine?" Instead of doing that, which is a manual effort now, our platform allows him to see that in a remote location and say, "Oh, these things have been closed off in appropriate time manner. They're timestamped. They're documented all standard for compliance as the healthcare system wants it today."
SAL DAHER: Interesting. We were just chatting before the podcast that your friends with Jack Huntress, who I call... What's the nickname? Yeah, Action Jack Huntress.
JINESH PATEL: That's a good nickname for Jack.
SAL DAHER: It's Action Jack, the real Action Jack. Because he carries like a chainsaw in the trunk of his car.
JINESH PATEL: Yeah. That's the Jack that I know.
SAL DAHER: You know the story Joe Caruso?
JINESH PATEL: No, I don't know that story.
SAL DAHER: Jack went to visit Joe at his house to sign some document or something. It happened. It was just the day after a windstorm and there was a tree that was down and Jack asked, "What happened to your tree that's down over there?" "Oh, yeah, I got to get somebody to cut it up and take it away and so forth." Jack happened to have a chainsaw in his truck.
JINESH PATEL: Oh my god.
SAL DAHER: He cut the trunk.
JINESH PATEL: That sounds like Jack. He's always prepared for anything.
SAL DAHER: Yeah, and Joe Caruso comes out, "Woa. I couldn't believe that."
JINESH PATEL: That's how he got his first investor. He's ready for anything.
Parallels Between UptimeHealth, HomeBinder and Squadle; The Binder-Replacement Business
SAL DAHER: He's just an amazing guy. So, you were making a comparison between his startup, which is HomeBinder. He's been interviewed on this podcast, amazing character. It's just amazing thing and a really interesting business. Sort of helping people document maintenance of their homes, which people don't do. You're helping medical facilities document what they're doing. There's a lot of commonality but there's another business. I'm an investor in a company called Squaddle. I like to have the small guys on here. What they do is they help chain restaurants document the stuff that's going on in the kitchen with an iPad or something like that, which used to be in binders. So basically, in the binder replacement business.
JINESH PATEL: It's exactly... Once you start digging into some of these industries that have been around for a long time, you start seeing how many things are documented in paper format, because that's how it's been done for 20, 30 years. Managers from that world have just taken over their best practices but never digitized it. The value of digitizing these binders is amazing because it's operational efficiency. It's more accountability and-
SAL DAHER: Definitely because people fake a lot. In the food business, the temperature readings. They have to take those things with these things. They're taking a digital thermometer, and it's time stamped on the app. There's no way to fake it.
JINESH PATEL: For us, as consumers, as consumers of healthcare for what we're doing. If it's consumers of food, for what Squaddle is doing. If it's consumers for anything, you would like to know that no one's faking this compliance data because it's important at the end of the day.
SAL DAHER: It really is.
JINESH PATEL: So that's one thing that we really are trying to get ahead of as we start seeing this shift in the healthcare model in the US.
Connections Between UptimeHealth and Cohealo
SAL DAHER: So, I was going to draw a comparison between what you're doing and what Cohealo does. Are you familiar with Cohealo?
JINESH PATEL: I am. I know Brett and Michael. We've met a few times and I'm getting pretty close to Michael but yeah, they're great guys.
SAL DAHER: Yeah, but it's totally different. Yeah, Cohealo is about sharing medical equipment. It’s software allowing people to know what medical equipment available when and where and all that stuff.
SAL DAHER: So, one thing that we just kind of at our surface level conversations talking to Cohealo about is, at some level, when we get to all these outpatient healthcare facilities, they're going to want to start sharing equipment too, because it is efficient. It's a great model. Michael and Brett have thought of something amazing. We've always talked about eventually doing some kind of partnership where you have a Cohealo module in what we're doing.
So, as you start understanding what equipment you have, where, and you opening up a new location down the street, and maybe there's a device that's only used once a week, instead of buying a whole new device. Having the ability to share it through Cohealo from our platform. So that's definitely something in our minds and something that we've talked at least at a high level about. We haven't put anything on paper, but I do like what they're doing a lot.
Comparison with Meenta
SAL DAHER: Another company that is also located at Venture Lane is Meenta.
JINESH PATEL: Yeah, actually we sit right next to Meenta, Gabor and Stephen.
SAL DAHER: Yeah, they've both been on this podcast. Meenta is in the business of sharing scientific equipment. It's a very busy space.
JINESH PATEL: I feel people are starting to understand what software can do in these spaces that... They're early adopters of technology, but not software, SaaS-based technologies that for us seem obvious. But for this world that, it's been around for a long, long time. They don't look at these solutions as game changing, even though we see the operational efficiencies as the game changes.
SAL DAHER: Oh, huge. So anyway, please tell us about the present team at UptimeHealth and what they bring to the table. Who's your co-founder?
JINESH PATEL: Yeah, so I have two co-founders. One is Bill Dunne. He's an expert salesman. He's been selling for 25, 30 years in the healthcare industry, anywhere from the payer or provider side. He used to be the AVP of Aetna and CIGNA. He was a Chief Growth Officer at Provant. We ended up bringing him on because we realized that we didn't have anyone that really knew how to sell into healthcare, or understand how to attack it, how to land these clients, how to speak their language from the business side. That's one thing that we kind of identified early on is we need a co-founder with that skill set. We brought on Bill Dunne. Our other co-founder is Bill Olson, who's our CTO. He comes from the asset management industry as well. So, for what we do at a very high level-
SAL DAHER: What you mean by asset management industry? Is the industry that's managing these assets that these facilities have?
JINESH PATEL: Right.
SAL DAHER: Like the machines and so forth?
JINESH PATEL: Like capital equipment as an asset. So, one of the worlds that UptimeHealth operates underneath is called integrated workforce management software solutions. A subset of that is computer maintenance management software. That's the world UptimeHealth is working in, which is maintenance management software for these smaller outpatient facilities. Even though we're doing other things like these daily, weekly, monthly compliance tasks, we're being a compliance tool at the very essence level. But Bill Olson used to be the SVP and CTO at Accruent, which is one of the largest asset management companies in the United States. While he was there, he realized that what we're doing matters. In terms of this whole outpatient model is not being serviced correctly with any kind of software.
“…we've created the industry's first marketplace for biomedical technicians to gain work and access to these outpatient healthcare facilities.”
Another layer of what we actually do, which I can't believe I didn't mention this before, is we've created the industry's first marketplace for biomedical technicians to gain work and access to these outpatient healthcare facilities. One of the other big issues that you find in this new model of care is that clinical engineering department I mentioned earlier, they're the people that actually service the equipment as well. So, if you're in an urgent care surgical center, you're using manufacturer contracts and vendors to do a lot of work.
An analogy is you have a Mercedes that breaks down, you take the Mercedes dealership, you're paying Mercedes pricing. Or you could take it to the guy down the street, who knows how to fix imported cars and pay half the price. So that same world exists in medical equipment management service and repair.
SAL DAHER: So, you're making that available to the facilities?
JINESH PATEL: Right, because at some level A, they don't know that these people exist because this market has never been exposed before. So, we've created the industry marketplace. The second thing is they can get their work for cheaper because they're not paying manufacturer pricing. The third is usually you'll find people who were actually more local to you than the technician you're using before.
SAL DAHER: Awesome.
“So, the uptime of your device has improved. The service response time has improved. The quality of customer service has improved.”
JINESH PATEL: So, the uptime of your device has improved. The service response time has improved. The quality of customer service has improved. There's a lot of things that happen in this marketplace that allow these smaller facilities to really thrive and become more operationally efficient than they currently are. The reason that's important is that was one of the big reasons Bill Olson, my CTO, came on this company, is even at his larger company, there was this need for this marketplace. Because there's times where this industry is super, super busy. There's not a lot of people that are in this world of equipment management for medical and therefore, there's labor shortages all the time. So, in a world where there's somebody who's out sick, but they're the only person that knows how to fix that one machine-
SAL DAHER: Oh, wow.
JINESH PATEL: ... and that machines down, how do you get help? Well, there has to be a secondary market of some sort. Because every day that CT scanners down or the MRI machines down, that's tens of thousands of dollars being lost for the healthcare system. Or that's a patient that can't get service that day, and they have to go find care somewhere else. So that having a secondary market is super important to just improving healthcare for the US, and then improving the operations for the healthcare facility. So that's one of the reasons we built it. One of the big drivers for Bill Olsen to come on the team, is he saw that as a big opportunity.
SAL DAHER: How did you recruit your co-founders? Just curious about this.
JINESH PATEL: Yeah. So, I moved here from Houston, Texas. So, coming to Boston was definitely a change.
Why Jinesh Patel Came to Boston to Start UptimeHealth
SAL DAHER: Why did you come to Boston?
JINESH PATEL: Boston. It's got that entrepreneurial eco... You mentioned at the very beginning and it's exactly right. It's got an ecosystem here that supports innovation and entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, at the time, when I was trying to launch this idea, Houston didn't have such a thing. They've done a great job since with TMCx. MassChallenge is down there. There's a lot of things... Johnson and Johnson's lab has gone down there. There's a lot of things they've done in the recent few years to really improve it but it's nothing like Boston. You come here; you find the right people. Everyone's willing to help make connections. It's a very tight knit community. There's a lot of capital that-
SAL DAHER: So, you went to Techstars?
JINESH PATEL: Yeah.
SAL DAHER: It's one of the jewels of the Boston entrepreneurial community is the fact that you have this outstanding accelerator, because Techstars Boston is very particular to Boston. I know there have Techstars in many different places, but TechStars Boston is a very special operation. The companies that come out of there are so impressive. Memphis is also Techstars company.
JINESH PATEL: Yeah, Meenta, HomeBinder-
SAL DAHER: HomeBinder-
JINESH PATEL: Me and jack are actually in the same class.
SAL DAHER: Awesome.
JINESH PATEL: That was where I think we came up with that fun analogy of... When we realized what we did, I was like Jack, "You're just UptimeHealth for homes." He's like, "Jinesh, you're HomeBinder for medical systems." I was like, "Yes, we are the same."
SAL DAHER: So, you came to Boston and so how did you connect with your co-founders?
JINESH PATEL: So that was a very interesting story. I first tried to start this office as a single founder. Immediately found how difficult that was, and it wasn't going to be sustainable. I didn't know how to code. I'm not a technical person by background. As I try to teach myself how to code, I quickly realized I was not going to level up to a point where I could actually build this company myself anytime soon. It's too complicated of a program to build by anybody, especially a non-technical founder.
SAL DAHER: But you're an engineer, you're a biomedical engineer, but you're not a programmer?
JINESH PATEL: Right. Yeah, I can build you hardware devices, but the software side is definitely a whole another animal. So then I immediately put a posting out on CoFounder Lab, AngelList, any place I could find a post, "I need technical help for this idea." That's when Bill Olsen found me. It was really serendipitous. I don't really have too much stock in these platforms that might actually produce something of value. But as soon as I saw Bill Olsen reach out, he's like, "Hey, I come from this world. I understand what you're doing. I want to help. Can we grab coffee?" So, we grabbed the coffee and immediately within the first five minutes, we were in sync. He was saying, "Here's what I see the industry as." I said the exact same thing. It got to a point where we're like, "Let's try building this together. See what happens."
SAL DAHER: These platforms work better than you think. You're not the first founder who's connected. People have connected through LinkedIn. I know people who have collected through these platforms. Ed Goluch of QSM Diagnostics, for example. There are always people looking for these. You and you hit it off.
JINESH PATEL: Yeah, it just kind of was really natural at the beginning. As we started learning how we work, how we operate with each other, we got to being very comfortable and saying, "Let's actually do this together." We gave each other co-founder titles. We started incorporating the company at that point, because before it was just more of an idea. Now it's trying to see it through. That was when I was saying immediately, we realized there's a piece here missing. I am the industry knowledge expert. Bill is the also industry expert but has a software lens to it. We didn't have any with the sales and go to market lens. That's when we put out.... This one we found on LinkedIn.
So, Bill Dunn, we put out a post saying, "We're looking for a sales representative for a startup company with all this great potential." And tried to sell the moon. We got a few hits. We started interviewing people for this job. Eventually, we found the person we liked. We were talking about how here's where we want to be, here's where we want to grow, does this excite you? We found Bill Dunn and he was just all in. He was like, "This is something I know I can sell. This is an industry that I can see disruption being in the near future."
SAL DAHER: Hot dog, yeah.
JINESH PATEL: We were like, "But we can't pay you right away. We have to raise funds. We have a lot to prove." He was all in. He's like, "No, this is it." As soon as we realized he’s willing to work with us for basically no pay at the beginning and just get it done and see where this can be is like that someone who is also a co-founder. They're willing to give up everything with no true line of sight to the future but just everyone has the same belief in where we can go with this company.
SAL DAHER: So, you had a raise?
JINESH PATEL: Right. So, we've done two micro raises and one seed raise. At the beginning, we did a friends and family round. We actually had this company that was helping us with our software, invest in the company. A small incubator fund called Jumpstart Foundry out of Nashville, they invested in us and then my family doing a little bit of money at the same time after we had gotten the essence of the product. Once that happened, we got into Techstars.
SAL DAHER: Oh, wow.
JINESH PATEL: With Techstars, we took some of their initial capital they gave us. We raised some money through the program. They introduced you to tons of amazing people, mentors, advisors, even investors. Asked people see what you're doing, and they get excited, they start asking if they can contribute. And then by that point, we had raised around $500,000 by the end of Techstars in totality. At the very end of the program, we realized we're going to need a seed round, because we have a lot of just very strategic goals we need to hit. So, we ended up raising around $1.25 million just right at the end of the summer. That's really what's been taken us all the way through today.
SAL DAHER: Who was the lead investor in that?
JINESH PATEL: So, there's a group here called 2EnablePartners. So, they're actually the lead investor in HomeBinder, Jack's company. I think you've interviewed Will as well from Ace-Up on this podcast.
SAL DAHER: Oh, yes, yes.
JINESH PATEL: So, he's got the same lead. So, somebody who really, really trust in this Boston ecosystem and what we're doing. So, they let our round. We had two other institutions come in, which one, was Overline VC out of Atlanta. They've been so helpful in client introductions and just strategy. The last one is Wavemaker 360 out of California.
SAL DAHER: Oh, excellent.
JINESH PATEL: They're really hyper focused in healthcare IT. So, they've been super valuable with industry knowledge, more connections to clients and just being a sounding board for a lot of the things that we're thinking about.
Sal Talks About His Syndicates – Tells About His Investment in FineTune Learning
SAL DAHER: Okay, very good. Coming up next, I want to ask you how your company is going to get found in the market. What's your go-to market strategy is? But before we do that, I'd like a little plug for my syndicates. I'd like to tell you a bit about another interesting company, a software company, which I was an early investor, that called FineTune Learning. When I invested FineTune was called Academic Merit. Have you run across FineTune at all?
JINESH PATEL: Can't say that I have but I definitely want to work into that.
SAL DAHER: Steve Shapiro is the CEO. It's a cool company. Originally started out as software that helps students deepen their engagement with literature. It was the brainchild of this really inspiring high school teacher from Maine named Ogden Morse. But now, it's a software platform that the College Board uses for the 3.6 million people who are going to take the AP exam with essay components.
JINESH PATEL: I remember taking those tests whenever I…-
SAL DAHER: Do you remember those?
JINESH PATEL: Yeah, yeah, do not miss them, but I remember...
SAL DAHER: I know. Well, the essay portion of the AP exam is now going to be graded on the FineTune platform.
JINESH PATEL: Oh, wow.
SAL DAHER: What it does is it helps the graders sort have a very consistent grading across graders. It also helps them do more the subtler things that humans are really good at and allows machine to pick up on the grammar and the spelling mistakes, all that stuff. It does that. So that basically doubles the capacity of a human grader. This is really consequential because imagine if your high school teacher could all of a sudden correct twice as many essays as she was able to correct before, he was able to correct before. That means that a lot more essay assignments are going to be given right? Kids are going to have to write-
JINESH PATEL: Pros and cons.
SAL DAHER: They're going to learn to write better.
JINESH PATEL: That's true.
SAL DAHER: The more you write, the better you get at writing. Reading and writing are fundamentally counterintuitive things, and we have to do them a lot in order to get good at them. We have an instinct for language. We don't have an instinct for reading and writing.
JINESH PATEL: One of the things that kind of brings you back to as I remember turning in assignments in high school, junior high, and not getting them back in a timely manner because of how long it takes to grade those. So not only is it you can do more, but the feedback of how did you do is quicker and more instant. Which for someone who's trying to learn and get better, that's going to be so valuable.
SAL DAHER: That allows teachers to spend time doing that, instead of the grammar. This is the future of artificial intelligence really is empowering humans in doing whatever they do much better giving them superpowers. So, this is like giving teachers superpowers. And this is just starting. I mean, it's going to be more. Maybe the multiplier eventually be three or four, I hope. But just imagine what an impact this company has. They're doing really well. So, the point of this, of mentioning this company, besides being inspired by them is really something else. Steve Shapiro was interviewed on this podcast, the CEO. He's not a founder. He's somebody who came in and kind of took the company in new directions. An amazing guy, that's tremendous leader.
Here, at the Boston ecosystem, we see so many amazingly interesting companies. We've talked about quite a few of them. I like to take some of them into my syndicates, and invest in them, and bring other people into them. So, if someone's an accredited investor, I urge them to go to my website, angelinvestboston.com, and go to the syndicate page and qualify yourself as an accredited investor. And then let's talk because there are lots of interesting companies in the Boston area that could be interesting to your portfolio. As I say, this is an idea-rich, cash-poor environment. With so many universities here, there's so much stuff going on. There's room for people to provide money into that system. But anyway, so Jinesh, tell me, how is the world going to find out about UptimeHealth?
UptimeHealth’s Go-to-Market Strategy – Land & Expand
JINESH PATEL: Great question. So that's one thing that as a startup, you're always trying to figure out how do you get your name out there. In such a busy world, especially when healthcare is constantly changing and evolving and past cycles of flu seasons coming up. So, everyone's busy and it's hard to get in touch with decision makers because they're too busy trying to make sure they can take care of all the patients.
So, when you asked me earlier what UptimeHealth does and I missed on the fact that we even have this whole marketplace idea. We do so much for these small healthcare facilities that we have to package our product down to something that they can eat today. So, bite sized model that they can digest, absorb, find value of UptimeHealth and now, we slowly upsell these other aspects of what we do over time.
SAL DAHER: Okay, so land and expand.
JINESH PATEL: Right. So today what we're doing is we're telling urgent care, surgical centers, optometry, dental, all these outpatient facilities, "We want to automate and digitize your daily weekly monthly compliance things. Therefore, we have an immediate impact on how you do business. So instead of having your manager run around all these facilities, checking binders, we want her or him to spend more time with patients or helping the actual nursing staff get their job done, versus these administrative tasks."
So that's what we're selling as a package today, what we call our GoCheckit product. once we're in the system themselves, after that, they start seeing UptimeHealth provides value. From there, we'll upsell the fact that, "Okay, now that we're helping you with these small task list items, we want to help you with all of your medical equipment as well." Because they also have these task list items, yearly inspections, quarterly service, whatever that looks like. "You can manage it all in the same platform, just let us come in and inventory your system." Or "You provide us with the inventory, we're automatically update the platform for you."
So now we're selling them asset management services. Once they're in that world and start seeing value on that, I'll say, "Hey, I've noticed that you're using this manufacturer for all your service. Did you know we have a marketplace that can also find you the right technician for that make and model and someone who could do that cheaper, faster, more local? Would you like to find out who this person is?"
SAL DAHER: Oh, wow.
JINESH PATEL: Or engage in our marketplace. So, it's levels of upselling but the one thing that we had to realize in healthcare is you have to build trust with who your client is, provide value, early, upfront, cheaply. That's this GoCheckit product. From there, once they trust you as a vendor, because their whole business is reliant on whoever they trust as their vendor. So, if you're not someone who they understand right away, there might not use you because it's just not an early adopter-style industry.
SAL DAHER: Oh, no, no, no. Far from it.
JINESH PATEL: Right. So that's our strategy is.
SAL DAHER: Dealing with human lives.
JINESH PATEL: Right. And then the other thing is we're hyper focusing on urgent care today, because that's the market that's expanding the most. Left and right you're seeing new urgent care pop up in strip malls or in your local communities. The fact that that's growing at such a high level and a fast paced, we're trying to be a solution for them to help them grow at such a fast paced. So that's why we're doubling down on that now. And then eventually going into all these other segments I've mentioned, surgical centers, optometry, dental imaging, ERs. That's our plan today, but we'll continue to change that direction, as we learn.
SAL DAHER: Basically, you have inside salesperson. These are sort of enterprise sales that you're doing. So, the salesperson that you brought in is driving all of that. Right?
“…because we're the first people in this market doing exactly what we're doing it. There's no one who's paved a pathway to how to get this done. So, a lot of it is learning, trial balloon testing, A/B experimenting, whatever it looks like.”
JINESH PATEL: Right. So, we have Bill Dunn who's been focusing on the sales strategy. We have a Business Development Rep as well that's helping just get the word out there. If it's phone calls, emails, doing their own research, because we're the first people in this market doing exactly what we're doing it. There's no one who's paved a pathway to how to get this done. So, a lot of it is learning, trial balloon testing, A/B experimenting, whatever it looks like. We're doing all that work now. It's fun, it's exciting, but it's also every day you're learning something new, that's going to shift your opinion on something else.
SAL DAHER: How do you make money?
JINESH PATEL: So, we charge a software as a service fee, so SaaS fee for the compliance checking tool. So that's that GoCheckit product that helps automate daily, weekly monthly tasks. We do that a per facility level per month. We try and adjust that fee based on the size of the facility. We're not going to overcharge an urgent care. We're not going to under charge a big healthcare system. We want the pricing that makes sense for them that's providing immediate value today. Once we start selling the upsells of the asset management software tool, that's another SaaS fee on top of that. If they engage in our marketplace, we'll take a percentage of the actual work order transaction cost.
So, if they go to one of our service technicians on our marketplace, and they get a repair done for $500, we'll take a service fee to help facilitate all that and take the payment and process it. So that's a two-pronged business model. There's a SaaS component and then there's a marketplace take component.
SAL DAHER: How many places have you signed up?
JINESH PATEL: So today, we have around 66 facilities on our platform. Some of them have been with us since the beginning before we even had a real product. So, we've been using those as learning clients and they're mainly just what we call our client advisors. Anytime we have a new idea we'd call them and say "Hey, what do you feel about this? Will this change much?" But since the last two or three months, we basically doubled if not tripled our client base, because we've really got the product right.
SAL DAHER: Excellent, excellent. Where do you expect to be in five years?
JINESH PATEL: That's a fun question for me because I have a lot of ideas of where this company will go in about five years. Right now, we're tackling this urgent care space or this outpatient healthcare space. We're the first people really digitizing a lot of data that's in these facilities. Like I mentioned, everything's in binders, on pieces of paper. We're the ones saying, "We now know exactly what you have in your system medical equipment wise, which before was on an Excel sheet or an invoice somewhere else. We also know how old it is, how much you paid for it, how often it's breaking down because you're using our platform to manage it."
“…, if we can predict who's going to need new equipment in the next year, we're now a sales engine for people selling medical equipment of the exact same category.”
So, we can start mining this data to provide predictive analytics for our clients, helping them budget better. How much should you expect to spend on maintenance and repair this year? Which devices might actually be needing replacement this year, because it's aged? Or we pull in from the FDA recall center, and we tell them, "Here's the devices that are actually pretty dangerous. You should get those out of your system because they're on the recall list." These things aren't really automated today for our industry. But what this also does is it gives us a weird opportunity that's never existed before, which is, if we can predict who's going to need new equipment in the next year, we're now a sales engine for people selling medical equipment of the exact same category.
So, if I know you're going to need a new X-ray system, there's going to be a lot of people who would like to know who's going to be new X-ray system. Our clients would like to be proactive about that, because they don't want any downtime. So, if we can help incentivize, "We know you're going to need a new system. Here are three vendors in your area that sell something similar for you." Engage with them early on, be proactive about this. People and manufacturers are going to want to communicate at that level. So, we might be the first lead generation engine for the medical equipment space that's all based on predictive analytics.
SAL DAHER: Really interesting, really interesting. So that's where you want to be in five years.
JINESH PATEL: I want to be a turnkey clinical engineering or purchasing department for outpatient healthcare facilities. So, they go into one platform, they trust UptimeHealth to manage their equipment, and help them know when they need new ones, and then help transact all the purchasing.
Target Vision – How Jinesh Patel Fell into Entrepreneurship
SAL DAHER: Interesting. Very interesting. So now, let's talk about another one of your ventures. Let's talk about Target Vision. I have a brother who is an enthusiastic marksman and a firearms instructor and so forth. He's going to like this question. But anyway, so tell me about Target Vision and what it does and how it came about.
JINESH PATEL: Yeah, great question. So, I mean, you know I'm from Texas. Houston. That's a very-
SAL DAHER: I've been known that there are a few guns in Texas.
JINESH PATEL: Very firearms-friendly environment. I grew up with some friends that are really enthusiast about firearms and guns, make their own, have all the marksman certifications, whatever that looks like for them. While I was doing clinical engineering management in Austin, Texas, one of my best friends, actually the best man at my wedding. He came to me with an idea. He's like, "Jinesh, I just bought this gun that shoots 200 to 300 yards. I was going to try and see how it was doing inside my rifle. But it was just the worst experience ever." I was like, "What are you talking about?" I have no idea what he's mentioning. He talked to me about how today they have to use spotting scopes. They have to buy these antiquated technologies to really sight in their rifles [calibrate a rifle’s sight so it shoots predictably]. He's a tinkerer by background. So, he's like, "I built a camera technology that allows me to see what I'm doing."
SAL DAHER: I saw that. There's like two cameras. One is it at the target, one is this downrange from the target.
JINESH PATEL: Yeah, so he's like, "I have this technology where we deploy a camera next to target and it creates its Wi-Fi feed back to your shooting desk" So you can see everything in a live stream. How you're doing in real time versus shifting your position, looking at your scope. Messing up a lot of the things that you shouldn't be messing up when you're trying to sight in a rifle at a long distance. I was like, "Okay, this is an interesting problem. Why are you telling me about this?" He's like, I want to build a business around this idea. I want you to help me out." I was like, "Okay." I had always wanted to build a company. I got an MBA from Texas A&M as well. Because I realized business and strategy behind this-
SAL DAHER: So, this was your entry into entrepreneurship.
JINESH PATEL: Yeah. So, he came up with this proposition and I thought about it as like I don't have debt right now. I don't have kid, wife. I don't have anything that would really be holding me back. It's not as if I'm going to get hurt if I fail.
SAL DAHER: So, you would eventually become the best manager, you didn't have a wife yet.
JINESH PATEL: Exactly. So, I thought about if anything were to happen or this failed, the only thing would be heard is my ego. That's not that big of a deal.
SAL DAHER: Great.
JINESH PATEL: And jumped in, feet first, learned about the industry, started realizing the strategy behind it, bring a different lens into it. Because I didn't know anything about it, asking different questions. We started realizing we had an interesting product here that allows people to really sight in the rifle digitally. But because we had a computer vision technology aspect to it, we could also track how people are doing on their piece of paper {a reference to the paper target].
“So, if you're both shooting at the same piece of paper, we can tell you who shot which bullet hole.”
So, we could help them say, "You were trying to shoot here but you shot here instead. Adjust rifle this way to get it back on target." Or now that we have a much more sophisticated algorithm, my friend's launching this year very soon is we can help go into gun ranges and score targets for people. Or you can play different target games with your friends that you've taken the range. So, if you're both shooting at the same piece of paper, we can tell you who shot which bullet hole.
SAL DAHER: Oh, wow.
JINESH PATEL: And allow you to say, "This was yours. This is your score. This is your friend. This is his score." Make this industry a little bit different. It wasn't anything in my mind that I had tremendous passion for. I just loved the experience of finding out a new idea, trying to figure out how do we take this to market. It was a strategy game to me. That's where eventually once we got to a point where the company was doing okay, I realize this wasn't the industry I really wanted to be in long term. I just wanted the experience of building a company. Today, I'm still advising the company. I talked to my friend once every couple week just to go over a strategy. It's still going on. It's doing really well today.
SAL DAHER: I can tell it. You launched new products and so forth.
JINESH PATEL: Oh, yeah. It's been fun. I wouldn't trade that experience for the world.
SAL DAHER: So, he got you off the sideline into entrepreneurship.
JINESH PATEL: Yup, he is definitely the biggest reason I'm doing what I'm doing today, which is he showed me what entrepreneurship would be like. It wasn't fun at the beginning, but it was one of those things that that stress was the kind of stress that you crave if you're an entrepreneur. Once I realized that was something that kind of made me tick, I wanted to continue doing it.
SAL DAHER: Entrepreneurship is risky, right? 60, 70% of enterprises don't return the capital. That's Angel Capital Association. But actually, I found out recently that people fail at their jobs 50% of the time. When you take on a new job, the failure rate is 50%.
JINESH PATEL: Interesting.
SAL DAHER: So, a job is pretty risky too and people don't realize that. It's not as evident of failure as a company failing, because people can they get lateral moves, they go on to another job where they might succeed in the next one. But people can often be put into situations that are like set up for failure and they fail at it. So, people fail much more often to their jobs than we suspect. So, if you're young, why not think about taking this kind of risk?
"I'm young. There's a lot of time I have to correct whatever happens if it goes south."
JINESH PATEL: That was exactly it. Because I was 24 at the time where I started building Target Vision with my friend Clay Rhoden. It was that thought, which is "I'm young. There's a lot of time I have to correct whatever happens if it goes south." Which thankfully it didn't. But if it did, then I was able to rebound and that's one of the big factors of going into it.
SAL DAHER: That is such a great story. How did you discover your love for building things?
JINESH PATEL: That's one thing that I always think back upon like which is "Why me? Why am I the one building this company? Am I crazy?" It's everyone else saying that I'm the crazy one. But I think it comes back to I have this weird love for games. Like I love board games, strategy games, or just learning new things. You can ask a lot of my friends. It's one of those things like if I put my mind to it, I'll start just trying to figure out how do I become really good at this? Over time, when I was working in that more corporate environment, I realized the fun part of having that job of being [inaudible 00:41:24] manager was the strategy involved with how do you write this department and make it really efficient.
“…I love entrepreneurship because every day is so different. Every challenge is a new strategy.”
But once that's done, a lot of the hard work is done. It's kind of a rinse-wash repeat style system. Going back to the game analogy, a game is different every time depending on the opponent you play. But if you ever play a game where you can become efficient at it, it kind of starts boring me after some period of time. It showed me that I love entrepreneurship because every day is so different. Every challenge is a new strategy.
SAL DAHER: It is a game it's perpetually new. You never know what's going to come down the pipe.
JINESH PATEL: Yeah. Like I was saying, it's that fun stress for me where I kind of just want to learn and dig into things that I never thought I'd be digging into before. Just really uncovering a whole new world, then you start looking in the future and you realize it's an endless strategy game, which makes me so excited. That's one of the things that I think pushes me to be an entrepreneur.
SAL DAHER: Interesting. Interesting. Tell me about where you grew up, what your family did, and if it contributed to entrepreneurship.
JINESH PATEL: Yes, I grew up in Houston, Texas. My father is a physician. He's an infectious disease doctor at UTMB Galveston.
SAL DAHER: Also, he gets to travel exotic places.
JINESH PATEL: Yeah. No, I think the exotic travelers come to him to see if they have infections.
JINESH PATEL: But he's been one of the ones since I've been a child pushing me to become a doctor.
SAL DAHER: Funny a parent pushing an Indian child to become a doctor. I've never heard of that.
JINESH PATEL: Yeah, I think it's a really unique. I'm the only one that's ever faced this situation.
SAL DAHER: I’m of Lebanese ancestry It happens there a little bit in this too. I can tell you that.
JINESH PATEL: So, growing up in that household. My mom, she raised me and my sister and then eventually did work because I think that's where I get my “busybodiness” from. My mom is never satisfied to sitting still. So, she still did side jobs. She's an accountant. She's a bookkeeper. It's one of those things that I had this “busybodiness” from my mom who always seems to be doing something and this intrigue from my dad in the healthcare world that allowed me to really understand this is kind of who I am. Now, when it comes to entrepreneurship. My dad's been at the same job for over 30 years.
So, it's not like he's one that really kind of branches out, but he's an idea person. You could tell every time that he's talking about his work. He's always thinking that "Oh, we can make this department better. We can do this better." And over the last-
SAL DAHER: Oh, he's an intrapreneur.
JINESH PATEL: Yeah. Over the last six or seven years, he recently branched out and started doing more entrepreneurial style activities. I think either I was a catalyst for him. So, in that I'm taking risk and it's not all that bad or we kind of met that at the same time where we wanted to just kind of branch out.
SAL DAHER: Is he an immigrant?
JINESH PATEL: Yeah. So, I'm first generation. He came over here.
SAL DAHER: I'm an immigrant. My parents are also immigrants here. One of the things that tends to happen with the immigrants that come here, they're like, "This is such a benign place compared to where I was before." I don't have to take a lot of risk here because your life, in a place like Brazil, a place like India, it's very contingent. Crazy stuff happens. America is so much more predictable. Things are so many so much more benign here. Why take risk? Succeeding at a job in America is so rewarding. You don't have to go out and take crazy risks. So, I think like the people who first come here because they're taking such a massive risk that they're doing, leaving a country, going to another country. It's very uprooting, they say "Yeah, why take any more risks than I have to."
JINESH PATEL: That alone is like an entrepreneurial journey, which is you're going into a whole new world, don't know what the outcome is going to be. You're just hoping for the best and thankfully, it all worked out.
SAL DAHER: Then the children. Gabor Bethlendy says this too. "So, my parents uprooted themselves and came to America. All I'm going to do is just sit and have a job. No, I'm going to go and start something." I think there is this psychology at play as well.
JINESH PATEL: I think you're 100% right, which is they gave us a chance to have a more opportunistic or-
SAL DAHER: Stable, perfect life. Everything is beautiful, and so on. And then you say, "I'm going to take crazy risks."
JINESH PATEL: Yeah. And then sometimes they look at you like "Why?" But then they realize they did same thing-
SAL DAHER: Exactly.
JINESH PATEL: ... and they support you.
SAL DAHER: Huge thing. These are entrepreneurs at heart and to take the kind of risk. Imagine, you will always speak with an accent. You will always be a little bit the outsider. Because of that, and immediately identifiable. Yet, they say, "No, we can do it. We're going to do this." People say, "Oh, if the United States had open borders, 7 billion people come to." No, 1 billion, not 7 billion. I think it's like 1, maybe 1 in 17. It's like 1 and 17 would migrate. Because it requires a very special kind of person to become a migrant.
JINESH PATEL: Yeah, you have to be the person willing to actually uproot yourself. That's where it's one of those interesting things when people take that risk. It's not because they're doing it just to say, "Hey, I just want to go there." They see opportunity. They are risk takers and entrepreneurs. That's why a lot of you said immigrants, either kid's entrepreneurs, or they themselves are entrepreneurs.
SAL DAHER: There's something bubbling in there. There's actually science to point to that direction. They've done studies. They're like counties in Sweden, they had a lot of people emigrate and they look at the names and people have unusual names. They were able to discern that the really countercultural and kind of like people who just wouldn't accept things as they are were the ones who immigrated. The counties where a lot of these people immigrated, they voted differently from people who were a lot of these people stayed, people with unusual names. That people that are wired differently.
One of the things we'll talk about responding to economic shocks, economists, the Schumpeterian model of creative destruction that the companies go under and they free up resources so that new companies can rise and so on. When that affects a region, I think they have to revisit this. Because the big problem is there are pockets of places in America, which are very poor, and have suffered a lot because of companies leaving and so forth. In those places-
JINESH PATEL: The industry's changing or whatever.
SAL DAHER: ... and they don't recover. I think one of the reasons that people say, "Well, we shouldn't subsidize places, we should help people, blah, blah, blah." But the reality is you have to pay attention to the places as well, because a very small percentage of people will uproot themselves and move somewhere else. The majority of people will not do that. Those people, you have to create an environment that supports them, because you cannot expect everybody to be an immigrant, even within the United States or internationally.
JINESH PATEL: You're taking the broad approach that everyone who is displaced in some way shape or form, if it's a job or if it's where they're living that they'll just easily adapt to whatever's next.
SAL DAHER: Give them the bus ticket to a place that's more [inaudible 00:48:03]. No, doesn't work so easily.
JINESH PATEL: Yeah, I know exactly what you're saying. I agree with that.
SAL DAHER: It works for a certain percentage. Those people have long left those places. It's part of the problem places have. So, I think new solutions, people have to look at this with fresh eyes, because they're making assumptions that are just not realistic. But anyway, so this is really fascinating discussion.
Jinesh, let's take a few minutes now and kind of open up to you and then let you touch on topics that are of interest. That you would like to address to an audience of people who work at startups, investors, founders.
Jinesh’s Concluding Thoughts
JINESH PATEL: Sure. Yeah, I think I just want to revisit the TechStars and Boston ecosystem part of what we were speaking of earlier, which is I came to Boston to build this company because the ecosystem is rich. Honestly, it's been so invaluable. I don't know if UptimeHealth would survive without being in Boston or what that path or trajectory would have been otherwise. So, I have to thank all the people who when I first came here, I didn't know a single soul in Boston.
SAL DAHER: Oh, Wow.
JINESH PATEL: Started randomly networking, the people who raised their hand to grab coffee. Listen to what I'm building, seeing if they had anyone else that could introduce me to, and then following up. It's one thing to say, "I'll help you out. I'll make that introduction for you."
SAL DAHER: Yeah, but actually doing the actually doing it.
Of Advisors and Mentors Jinesh Says: “…the percentage of actual follow up was so high. I didn't understand like, "Oh, these are real people really trying to help."”
JINESH PATEL: But actually, doing the actually doing it and then the percentage of actual follow up was so high. I didn't understand like, "Oh, these are real people really trying to help." Like I came from an ecosystem where people would say, "I'm going to help" and then maybe didn't actually follow through. That facilitated me to learn more about who's out in Boston.
“There's a big difference between meaning to help and knowing how to help. I think that in the ecosystem here in Boston, there's a lot of practice on what do you do to help somebody when somebody asks you for this kind of help.”
SAL DAHER: There's a big difference between meaning to help and knowing how to help. I think that in the ecosystem here in Boston, there's a lot of practice on what do you do to help somebody when somebody asks you for this kind of help. There are certain things that you do and you kind of like have that rehearsed, so then it actually gets done. So, it's not just an aspiration.
JINESH PATEL: And then it was that whole ecosystem that you started building beneath me. I had a contact list of people I could ask questions to. They would introduce me to other people, started meeting other founders, and slowly built my network where I started meeting with people from Boston TechStars. That was eventually where the point where I asked, I think Aaron O'Hara and at the time who is actually now in the new TechStars class, with his own company, but he was helping Clem Castle as a managing director. So, he was helping Clem and his program. I said, "What I'm building, does this seem like something TechStars would be interested in?" He's like, "I think if you apply, you'll have a pretty good shot."
SAL DAHER: Oh, wow.
JINESH PATEL: So, I applied and that's really what catapulted UptimeHealth in the Boston ecosystem with who we are, who knows us, how we can be helpful to other people. Because at that moment, I realized how I got to that point, which is everyone else raising their hand to help me out. So now I do the same thing, which is anyone has questions? I'm going to grab coffee with them. If I can make dinner auctions, I'll make that happen. So, I guess one thing I want to touch on is I'm here to give back to the community. So, if there's anyone out there who wants to learn, maybe the struggles, the pros cons of starting a startup, or any connections that I might have on LinkedIn, or just what it's like to build a healthcare company in Boston. Grab a coffee.
SAL DAHER: This is a place to build a healthcare company. This is like healthcare capital.
But you see, Boston has a tradition of being seen on wing land, sort of flinty, closed place. The Cabots speak to the Lodges. What is it? The Lowells speak to the Lodges. The Cabots speak only to God. But it's not like that.
JINESH PATEL: No, from Texas, everyone is warm and friendly. I'm still a Texan at heart. I love the fact that I can go anywhere people strike up conversations with you. It's just so welcoming. And then when we were saying we're going to move to Boston, and everyone's like, "Oh, why Boston?" There's this perception of ever being closed off as you just mentioned. Then we come up here, and it's not that. So, I don't know where that perception came from.
SAL DAHER: There are many reasons for that perception!
JINESH PATEL: But in general, we were at least not met with that same preconceived notion of this as a closed off community. It's been welcoming to me and I'm planning to grow this company here in Boston. I can't wait to see how I can help other startups and founders get to the system.
SAL DAHER: Yeah, that is so interesting. The thing that redeems the old Yankees, is that they were insular. That was kind of their downfall. But they were, at the same time, very big on creating voluntary associations and so forth. So, I think that's the manifestation the universities themselves, all these research institutions, foundations and all that. That's a very Boston thing. Go and start, volunteer this and volunteered that. So that tradition has come down to us, the insularity somehow has melted. I don't know how. I think the cuisine has improved. The insularity has melted. So, we do owe a debt to the old Puritans in the sense of being people who go out to a wilderness and do crazy things. They were immigrants in a away, and so we're kind of inheriting that with much different names. Names are, very, very different from theirs.
JINESH PATEL: Of course.
SAL DAHER: We're inheriting that ethos of helping others and so forth, which is very much a Boston thing.
JINESH PATEL: Yeah. I'm here to give back in the same way that they've given to me. So that's my what I'd like to say to anyone else who just wants to learn, grab coffee, I'm here for that. The other thing is, if there's anyone out there who maybe knows, like these healthcare system, or these smaller outpatient healthcare facilities, were also the moment of learning. As a startup, you'll never stop learning. So, if there's anyone who has these connections and allowing us just to talk, interview. We're not trying to sell, really trying to learn. We would love to have conversations with people who have that mindset of "We own urgent cares. We own surgical centers. Here's how we think about the future?" Those kinds of conversations really excite me
SAL DAHER: Jinesh, I'm going to put you in touch with somebody who could be very interesting.
JINESH PATEL: Okay, I'd love that.
SAL DAHER: A physician who might be very interested in talking to you.
JINESH PATEL: I appreciate that.
SAL DAHER: She lives upstairs.
JINESH PATEL: Okay. Well, then I'll go knock on some doors. Yeah.
SAL DAHER: I'll put you in touch with her. Is there anything else that you want to say?
JINESH PATEL: I mean, other than, thanks for having me. This has been wonderful. I really enjoy the conversation. It's conversations like these that get me up out of bed every day. We're learning about you, asking me about what we're doing. Hopefully, my team sees that we're doing something great, and people are taking notice.
SAL DAHER: I'm very grateful to you for coming out to the studio and making time to be on the podcast. I'd like to invite our listeners who enjoyed this podcast to take a little time and go to the iTunes' website and leave a review. Written review is nice. If you really don't have time, just do a rating. Five stars is okay.
JINESH PATEL: Yeah, minimum.
SAL DAHER: Minimum. That helps us get found and helps the word get out with such worthy entrepreneurs as Jinesh. This is Angel Invest Boston conversations with Boston's most interesting angels and founders. I’m Sal Daher.
I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme was composed by John McCusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.