Hey, brand builders. Ready to take your brand to the next level? I'm Dana Hammons and welcome to the brand blu-shrink. (upbeat music) What's up everybody and welcome back to the brand blu-shrink where we break down how founders are actually building, scaling and surviving these brands at real time. Not the Instagram version, but the real version. We're still in capsule six, our deep dive on scale. What it looks like when you move from idea at MVP into something that actually grows and sustains itself. Today we're talking about scaling in one of the hardest arenas out there, health care. My guest is Dr. Rice Piro. He is a trained medical professional who is building fantastic tech by day and is partly the founder and CEO of OpenScope Health, a company that's reimagining how we evaluate symptoms and navigate care using AI. Now, Rice and his team are building what they call personalized health agents, always on health partners that understand your full health story and help you actually cultivate health. Instead of just waiting until something breaks and heading to the ER, which is definitely, I think, what most of us do when it comes to our health care. OpenScope's first product is an on-demand symptom checker that gives people intelligent educational health insights instead of sending you down the 2AM Dr. Google Rabbit Hole. They've already launched, attracted thousands of users, generated revenue, and are now a conversation with health systems for pilots. Really, really fun and exciting stuff. On top of that, Rice has this journey from content creator to coffee founder to EdTech. And now in this new chapter, he is a mid-tech founder who is focused on scaling his company. So we're going to talk to him today about scaling the company and when your day job is literally saving lives and helping people diagnose health symptoms. This is something that we definitely want to learn more about. So, Rice, welcome to the brand Blueprint. I'm glad we finally got you on the show. Yeah, thanks, Stain. It's great to be here. I appreciate you taking the time to have me on. And I appreciate that warm intro as well. I don't know if I could have come up with this kind of one. Well, that's part of my job as a host of the pot. And I definitely want to first jump in and let the audience get to know you a little bit better on a personal level. So if you are ready, let's jump into our rapid fire question and answer a second. Sure, yeah, let's do it. All right, great. Let's get started. So, very popular first question on the pod. Coffee or tea? You know, that one's a funny one for me. I've copied for years. I even had my own copy company. It's over the last year or so. I've been doing a lot of tea as well. Cut, not so much tea. Afternoon, and as my pick me up, I've seen her another cup of coffee, but definitely coffee in the morning. Now, tell me, I mean, as a person who obviously spent a lot of time engaged in the coffee categories as a follow-up question, are there are you a person who has a very specific way that you want your coffee made? Are you pretty general with kind of your cup of coffee when you do get coffee, especially being somebody who was invested in the space? How do you order coffee now? Yeah, I now I'll go with a lot of cool brew. I'm just kind of straight black cold brew, I think. In our essence, that's flavor. Our company actually used to make, it was called Snapchat with Jose. So they threw it out and then they called it right after, and somebody like cool it down. They gave it like a very strong, but you need flavor. A lot of like coffee, punks, or like that flavor. But yeah, the time here, I'm not doing that anymore. I usually just go for the straight boring cold brew. Ha, nice. Now, following up with that, you want to talk a little bit about your background professionally because fascinating in the sense that you did go to school. You don't practice right now, but I'm curious to know, if you worked pursuing this tech startup and had you not decided to go into medicine, what do you think you would be doing right now? Yeah, I mean, I know when I was growing up, I really wanted to be a baseball player. That was the only thing. That was always the dream. Look at this. I was a pitcher. I don't know if you'd call it. For yeah. Wow. You don't have to go to the big leagues. I don't know if I'd be doing that right now, but that was always the dream before I went down the medicine route. I love it. I mean, I think a lot of us have had those kind of aspirations to go to the next level, but it's pretty cool that you actually played at the collegiate level, which is not something that I think many of us aspiring at, please get to do. We most of us top out at high school. Right. And that's about it. So you still did a great job of achieving that space. So one word, your first friends we've used to describe. Yeah. Funny. I think a lot of my close friends or family members might think I'm a little crazy with all of these startups and going from medical school into startups and packing all of that. So maybe a little crazy, but in a nice, endearing way. And then they've all kind of unassuming. I don't really-- I'm pretty late back. I get along with everyone really well. Not super-- I'm traring it or anything like that. Like-- yeah. Very cool. Now, as a tech founder, and somebody who comes from a very strong educational background, curious, in terms of your current utilization of tech, what's your one or two that you absolutely cannot live without right now? Like, can't say, can't you? So one that you absolutely cannot live without right now. Yeah. I will take the email. And then I think in LLM would be a little too easy. You know, I don't think you'd be doing this in life. That's not-- that's not-- that's not-- that's probably-- this question is probably to be asked over the eternity, right? And it's only been up in the last year or so that the answer could potentially be AI as a one. But you never check it out with you. I can't do without. I think one that I really use a lot though, maybe the size boot is Canva. I think you can only-- Yeah. Frank, the presentation design UI, when you're going in, getting rid of Canva, both of this, put out boring PowerPoints. I think it really does make a difference. It's an update, I'm meeting branding and all of that. But I do Canva a lot. No, it's bloody. I recently, as I transitioned into this consultancy from my quarterback grounds, became an avid user at Canva. But what was strange is, in my quarterback background, whether it was at Parker and Ginkgo, most recently Pepsi, Cogate, et cetera, it's 100% PowerPoint-advired, right? And so Canva was even out here. And I suspected most of my corner counterparts, you still in those organizations, likely don't eat, right? And PowerPoint is, to me, still suitable and it's still functional, but it's nowhere near as powerful of a tool as Canva. So really interesting how different lifestyle and career choices can kind of expose you to different technology platforms. So really good. One other question I want to ask before we get out of the Rampant Fire segment is, as you really look to scale your organization, you've got some really interesting approaches to technology. I imagine that is taking in a lot of research, a lot of reading, a lot of just kind of reading through the dreams of data, et cetera, to understand exactly how you want it to approach this. So if you could share with our audience, name a book, a podcast, the piece of content that you have come across over the last year. So as you're working to scale your companies, that you really feel like impressed you or changed the way you approach the business in a way that fundamentally is going to want to help you deliver the results. Yeah. I've talked about this before, but there's one book that-- and I don't like the dramatic saying, oh, this book changed my life. I think I think I look a little bit better. Change my old thought process. This one book, I did read that kind of did that to a certain extent. It was called "How Come Me" by Rory Sutherland. And most of my life, I had this very kind of dry-- I'm not making drys a little bit. It's your more analytical brain, like that map brain, or whatever you would get all of it. Yeah. And I got the doctor's book, it had been called "Frave," it had been in the medical school, I memorized it all the medicine. And this one book, it talks about the other, that kind of analytical map brain, but there's also this other half, psychology, human-- the human part of the brain, it's like undersea, or all of the people interact with each other and how things make you feel the imagination. And the imagination is somewhat real, just as real as the other app, because the young people have seen the psychology. So understanding, when I read that book, it just kind of made me start thinking about the other half. And that's kind of where you get that creative startup like things, and just from there, I sort of think more and more about it. But like I'm able to think at the intersection of the two really well, whereas the nice, well boring analytical thing like that. That's interesting, because I've probably been a city you and the sense that my mind typically-- and I kind of came up in a more creative mindset of space-- and frankly have worked to build my analytical students. And it's been a life-small jerk. Like coming out of college, I was a working major in undergrad. And while I had the exposure to analytics and data, et cetera, it wasn't something that I was actually passionate about, whether something-- and I really--
leave them, or say. And so as I started to work my way to my corporate career, and ultimately my entrepreneur career, I realized, man, how much more depth I could bring to a conversation or to a strategy session by understanding and really embracing the analytics as well as the creative. And so, interesting from both of us are kind of coming from these two different person, those and learning kind of the other side of the brain of the way it works and trying to master that in the leveraging and our current endeavor. So, look, I appreciate your appreciation all of the personal insights and information, but I think we are ready to jump into the corner. We're ready to decide. Yeah, let's do it. Let's jump in. So, look, I, as I mentioned earlier in the interview, you have been really excited about having you come in to talk to you, talk to us about this, this platform that you're working on. And, you know, let's rewind a little bit. I didn't, I know you didn't go into mid school saying, look, I'm going to be an entrepreneur. I'm not going to practice medicine as soon as I finish this expensive, you know, three, four, five year run. I'm going to leave it and go to entrepreneurship, right? So, walk us through some of those, walk us through kind of your mindset coming out of the medical school experience. And what really motivated you man to say, you know what? I'm not going to pursue this profession that I spent a considerable amount of time, money and energy, you know, invested in. I'm going to go a different direction and go entrepreneurship. So, talk us a little bit about what your thought process was and what you were potentially chasing back then or what you were trying to achieve. Yeah, yeah, so when I of course, went into medical school, I had no intention of being an entrepreneur. I never really thought about it either way. Kind of getting good grades and felt like I was next step. That was a play, yeah. And then funny enough is one entrepreneurial opportunity after another kind of popped up. It all really started with a social media page. My medical school roommate one day asked me, hey, do you want to make a tick talk? And I was like, come on, man, I'm grown up. I got, I got ready for and then you'd like that. I don't know, I'm a tick talk. And then I don't know, another day, yeah, it's again, we're like, all right, until we went in and they were all kind of memes and gifts and jokes or medical students, things like that. We made one and then it got, I don't know, a couple thousand views. I was all excited and made another one and another one and now suddenly, I look at this 100,000-bar audience that I was kind of running like a little small business. So, they're like, with reader funds, should we be a part of it? With brand deals, do we want to do? And which ones will get us the best payoff and things like that. So, that little piece, I don't, I don't know, if I knew, was it on to the real thing for say, but I knew I would go, I enjoyed this kind of creative problem solving and things like that. And then I think a year later, we started our first kind of real company, which was a copy company, ready to drink coffee for healthcare providers. We built it all out. It was kind of joke that it was like my craft force MBA and that I had no business background. And then all of a sudden, when we got complex supply chain where we're shipping beans from Colombia up to Brewery and Boston, that Brewery and Boston brewing it, sending it large quantity down to us in Charlotte. We were storing in Charlotte and sending it out to end customers. And by the end of all, we were doing okay from our revenue perspective, but basically, our bottom line wasn't doing nearly as well and we're about breaking even because of all those different because it was costing me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it breaks the ship ahead with two. So I just look at it in general. And this is free tear. Right. This is free tear. Yeah. I would add to getting American beans at that point. But from there, so we ended up top that down just because of that start of living. You're breaking even with an e-commerce company that don't really work. It worked better if you're an early stage tech company. But correct. Right. The scene and ended up a year later starting a tech company, the AI board for medical students, studying with all these complex practice questions that give you a little stem. Yeah. For instance, oxygen, explanation, why I got it right or wrong. That's what everyone uses to study for the exam day isn't. But the leader in it is kind of templated. It's not really anything too special. So we figured out we could make something very similar with AI and target the price. So we built all that out. That's still currently up as a stable SaaS. But then when I was nice in my last year of medical school deciding what I wanted to go to residency or wanted to do, I mean, it's kind of a funeral thing. I mean, I knew what I wanted to do was be at the end of section of medicine and tech, not education. So yeah, we started up at Ompetsco, but just what we're doing now and just kind of knew that's really what I was passionate about was kind of the intersection of medicine and levitation and creating new things. Just kind of been head down, trying to build that out from here and I got to where currently. Wow. Okay. So let me let's jump into it in, you know, given what you're building right now and your own words. What is Ompetsco PIL? And what's the core phypallum? You are obsessed with trying to solve. Yeah. So our general phrasing is Ompetsco is helping patients navigate their care and next steps all in one place. So and then so we're taking basically a new patient comes and 75% of patients will start with the Google search, not another real doctor. They're medical journey. So if I have a weird symptom pop up, I'm all I'm googling it or chat you be seeing it now instead of like actually getting medical care and good information and that kind of leads to this web and the doom scroll. We'll call it as a joke. I'm down there. Yeah, I'll just say you think you have three different types of cancer because you got to nitrize the combination. It's a fact of fact that more or less actually questions like a doctor would. So it actually brings in your complaint. I don't know. I have a weird spot in my arm. I don't know. I don't know what it is and the more questions what other is it what side is it how long you had it. And so you're actually putting in more variables before it spit out these are what it could potentially be based off of our kind of branching and the taxonomy. And through that you can then go and select your type of concerns and basically be routed into the right type of care. So if we think it's kind of a simple exomatite picture you could go straight to a care doctor. But for the health system if we think it's more complex like a sensor small or something like that and then you get routed straight into the dermatologist. So it's trying to get you to the care you need more efficiently. And I think we have the power to do that now with AI. It's just a matter of actually getting it greatest all of the different health system that kind of get limp to adopt the new way of doing it. And that leads to my second question which is given the information that you are as a consumer giving to open scope and then giving the information you guys already have how different is this from a random search on Google or to your point on chat GPT like how much more personalized is this advice or this information. Yeah so that's kind of the key is the idea is we want to make we want to take all this complex medical information and basically present it to patients in a way they can understand because so much of it is I mean I baseline it should do different language you know all of these anatomy words all these to the logic words that you know they need to be translated in a way if you can understand and to do that you need more information than just that want chief complaint is looking at the medical premise that I have a weird spot on my end. I need additional all of questions and most people don't know what those are because they didn't go to medical school you know so that's the kind of the real idea there is being able to actually get more and more information before we give you that output so it's not just yeah I have a headache weapon piece of the cancer it's I have a headache I get migraines or once in a while it's probably just a migraine and then figuring out do I need to go see that neurologist or should I just wait out and hope that they come back and think like that they're getting much more inputs and much more efficient output. Nice very nice. Now is that connected to your personalized health agent a feature and I know that phrase sounds you know really really complicated and big but talk a little bit about what the personalized healthy agent means for your user and like what features are real right now and then what's the vision because I know with AI I've worked with several clients working with several clients who have AI refuse projects as some of the features that they aspire to have are not quite ready or available yet some are ready to go right now so talk a little bit about like what the personalized health agents actually do and then how that how that translates to to the user. Yeah so a personalized health agent is kind of this big idea that eventually all of those updates on your health your blood pressure checks your reminders about what to eat when to exercise who to call if you have an headache and where to go and think like that can all be done in one place with AI if it's done efficiently enough and I think it is somewhat baby steps and that you need to get people used to something anything that helps that feels foreign so it feels foreign using those kind of new app like we're to do it but once you get a little bit used to it and they're using more and more features that's kind of the way to actually grow and build up so yeah so right now it's more about providing personalized education so if we think your weird symptoms may be a migraine it's saying yeah maybe it's best to stay out out of the lights say in our dark room just kind of take you the off-and-work, wait it out for eight hours.
or something like that. Yeah, for worse. And walking through all those little tips and tricks and things like that, those over-the-counter type solution, and then also, you're routed into the very specific, right type of care for your health. The further integrate, Kim, is once you get set up with those health systems and things like that. And you need your weekly blood pressure checks. The agent's actually reminding you to do that. And then if you go through it fully with an Apple Watch or a Woop or whatever, eventually you'll be able to take your blood pressure right there so you're not even having to fall out of the vinyl. Yeah. I never thought about that kind of you right. Like, we got all these smart devices. You could do it right to you. Yeah. And then the idea of you bring all the information in from these new tech and you're routing it back into your doctor who's able to say, "Oh, wow, that blood pressure did really spy class night like which bring them in for a check-up." Yeah, for blood pressure. So that full health front door picture is really the long term vision. I love it. Now let's talk a little bit about that other side because you are starting to engage with health systems right now and bring that side of the equation to the table. Talk a little bit about how open scope helps hospitals or health care systems, whether it's tri-izing better, reducing unnecessary visits, getting people like you just pointed out in that example to come into the hospital potentially when they may not have come in before. What is, you know, talk a little bit about the work on the health system side and what that looks like? Yeah. So there's a lot of waste and not use of the health system. So lots of people are sick. They need to go see a doctor, but they don't know where to start. And so health systems spend tons of money on these kind of spray and prairie type advertising, Google ads, billboards, all these things. And they're not nearly as effective as trying to figure out which people actually need the care and then trying to present the information away that they cannot. So yeah, the real value for these health system is to get the patients that need care into the right care more efficient. Like, Eloise, can you bring that back one more time? We need to hear that again. Yeah, the real value for these health system is to get the patients that need care into the right care more efficient. So there's a lot of wasted time with, I'll skip this three months down the line and hopefully I'll go to that primary care visit, but I really need a dermatologist. So the idea is to get them directly into the dermatologist and also with our routing system, they're able to find the dermatologist in an area that has the most, they're the next opening basically. So many times they just randomly searching online. You'll just find the first dermatologist that pops up. They have an appointment. I was able to get them and literally the next appointment with the dermatologist as we go out the four to great with the system. And then the other value for health systems is leakage. So when health systems in Charlotte, there's HM and no violence. So if HM loses 1% of their patients to no bond, it's kind of randomly. It'll be people just trying to find a mind, really, they need a dermatologist, the primary care at the time. The dermatologist, no bond, they just lost their patient. Even the 1% of that is $5-10 million dollars a year for hospitals. So the big wish for them to get a patient. Yeah, that's the customer service. You know, being, I mean, which translate the mark here for these hospital systems, right? Yeah. Yeah. So there's a big wish there. I'm trying to reduce that leakage and losing their patients to the neighboring systems. So I mean, this is a fascinating journey. You guys are fully engaged and it ended. I know some of your early traction. You've got a few thousand users, early revenue, system conversions, et cetera. Tell me a little bit about in these conversations and watching the data and watching your, um, principle concept unfold. What were some of the early surprises? Like was there anything that genuinely surprised you in the data or in the results or in how the consumer started to use the platform or something that maybe you didn't anticipate? Yeah. Yeah. So we had about 12,000 users so far. So it's some interesting data in terms of like who's using it, what type of complaints they have and things like that. I think the most surprising one. And it's not surprising at base line that it's more, but about 80% of the users were women. So I assume that maybe 64. Yeah, but you'd see about 80% of the users were women. And we were just kind of, you got to already predict this 60, 40. So you already expected a ponderance of women to use the platform works, but not at 80%. Yeah, it's basically, I mean, just the generic assumption is that women are a little more health-confessed, but yeah, I didn't clearly a lot more. Yeah, I didn't think it'd be clearly women are a lot more than we are. Yeah, yeah, it's just funny. So yeah, the 80 was like, wow, that's a pretty extreme difference. We saw a lot of GI complaints. That was kind of the biggest, the biggest. So we haven't sorted out between chief complaints. Really? At least he knows there's 41 sub-bucket. And then there's five individual positions in the table, the taxonomy so far. Yeah. And I was definitely the biggest like chief complaint bucket, which was for people who are trying to understand what their GI issues were. Yeah. And a lot of people like I have an upset stomach like, and what do I do? Like, where do I go? What does this mean? So yeah, that was a very, very common one. There was a lot of headache of ENT kind of whole headache, I have congestion, I have stuff in there. Let all kind of goes together to that thing of that class. I'd already picture some misogetsted, it gets them with their head a little bit from that whole sinus area. Yeah. So we saw a lot there, those are kind of the two biggest and there's a few other ones that were a little surprising, but nothing too shocked. Well, the first one, surprisingly or not, it really resonates with me because I have Crohn's disease. And I didn't learn about my Crohn's disease until my son had a very severe bowel of Crohn's and we didn't know he had it. And so he was hospitalized for several months. And through his hospitalization, I realized when it was a genetic disease and too, he likely got it from me. And it opened up so many doors of understanding, man, that I struggled with my entire life. I went through, this was 37, 38. When I got diagnosed, I'm talking about multiple occasions where there was grade school, high school, college, sports where I had all these stomach issues. And I would complain to coaches and medical professions, etc. They could never figure out what it was and they misdiagnosed it so much. I mean, I probably drank peptobysmone, ate every in acid, tried every sort of stomach, like, you know, mother's remedy, old wives' remedy, like, man, I've done it all. Oh, and it was all into, was get the right diagnosis. And then I got put on the right medicine. And now I take you, Mary. I'm good. Right. This really resonates with me because to your point as a black man, we also come from a culture where we tend to be less trusting of the medical system and therefore less likely to go to a doctor when we meet him. Right. So having something like your open scope platform that I could have started talking to 10 years ago, maybe even 15 years ago before my son was diagnosed and potentially not only then identified my GI issues, but then down the stream, able to kind of prevent him from going through what he had virtually, which is really severe hospitalizations. So don't let it derail the interview, but that is fascinating to me because again, both numbers, 80% women usage or female usage and GI being one of the more prominent issues is this really eye opening data. Now it's a, had did it change? Or alter edit you guys's strategic approach to those segments like did you change anything about the platform to further appeal to your female consumers and vice versa for GI? Did you feel like you needed to bring more resources and information since it was such a highly tapped in category? Yeah. So the main thing there is based off of what's more popular, I guess that's the word, what they used more will go in and focus our medical review more there. So the models are kind of spitting out different, different fill diagnosis, the list of possible conditions. We'll go and review more the GI complaints and make sure they're on the right path so they're getting sharper and sharper and find and more and more like. Oh yeah. That's where we're really focused on trying to get the most popular questions, have to correctly. And depending on the same thing, like, yeah, let's say you were going through and you have random stomach issues and you don't know and the model thinks you are most likely, it may be a good chance to be cronest disease. It'll go out of your way to like you were saying not not into a primary care doc. I get you in with a GI specialist, not only a GI specialist, somebody who's actually trained, there's kind of tagging systems of work within GI. It's so important. Yeah, we can get specific, uh, praying to the specialist more or less and within that GI bucket as well. So really getting you to that right doctor and not the wasted visits like you were for years and some. Bryce, I listen, I'm talking directly to my audience. If you are out there experiencing medical issues that you have not yet found any clarity on, Bryce makes a great point. And I think one of the things that I actually struggled with early on in pursuing solutions
for my GI issues was finally always and only going to the primary. So I spent so much time with primary physicians who kept mixed diagnoses. And so I would encourage listeners and viewers of this pod to make sure if you have any questions that you haven't yet had a chance to use Opuscope. I first made you need to go on Opuscope, sign up, and start that process. But as you enter it to the Opuscope environment, just keep in mind, you may need to take that extra trip to a specialist versus consistently going to and accepting the answers from your client here. - Yeah, yeah, to fight a lot of, there's just two, my dad is in two baths for primary care doctors, or graceful, that wider is special as aching. It's just too vast to have every single thing of each single field all known and memorized at the same time. - Now let's talk about that. But let's talk about that because that's what AI really brings to the table and brings to your platform. But obviously, man, in this current day and age, while you and I find AI exciting and many others do, there are a lot of people out there who are understandably freaking out about AI what it potentially could mean from a negative standpoint. As you think about scaling and you're thinking about rolling this out further and continually building this product out, what are you doing to make sure that you can trust, you can gain that trust from both your patients and your physicians, et cetera, around the results that you are delivering with AI. 'Cause you talked about it getting better and getting more accurate. So how do you work on that part of the consumer perception issue? - Yeah, I think the key for us is that we want to be that bridge between the patient and the right doctor. - Whoa, we need to hear that one more time. (indistinct) - Yeah, I think the key for us is that we want to be that bridge between the patient and the right doctor. And there's a lot of confusion there. Let's understandable. Of course, it's not like it's impossible to be a doctor, but if you didn't go sit down and learn medicine for four years, it's impossible. You just don't have enough context. And that's something that bridge between that that translation layer basically is really what we want to become. And I think that bridge, which is getting patient to the right care and have experience of like, yeah, for a year, like I didn't figure out what it was and then all of the sudden, all of the sudden, I don't know, even a 20% antica be this. So maybe I should go see that specific specialist. And you know, now the specific specialist didn't go through and do the real test, you know, so for different biomarkers, we think like that and we figured out what I might have. But you almost lost in a shuffle without some type of middle layer trying to translate you into the right place. So I think I have one more data points of patients saying, wow, this really gives me the place more efficiently. And then they take that data and it's really the kind of key with any AI is taking the data that you do collect and using it to make your model more efficient. So more efficient. Yeah. Maybe this could have been a blend of when we did the metaphor review. I mean, it was fascinating. And it sounds like, I mean, just a lot of constant iteration and work. One of the ways and I would be remiss if I didn't bring this up before we wrap up the interview, that you and many other founders of fighting the way to actually get the data. And then we're going to have a lot of things to do with the to actually get some additional support and scaling is through accelerators and various programs that are available. And I met you as part of the Charlotte Generator program, our G Beta program. And so I wanted you to if you can share one or two ways that you feel like the program helped you in terms of moving forward with your current work on OpenScope. And any suggestions or advice you would offer founders watching this, who are thinking about signing up for or getting involved with an accelerator but a kind of confused or a little bit weary about doing it. Yeah, I think the number one thing is you go into maybe an accelerator generator specifically. And you have these big ideas and really a lot of domain expertise. So I have a lot of medical knowledge, a lot of technical knowledge, and I've even found it out to me before and on you in a different area. But what they do is really get you tailored and targeted to get ready to stale and that pathway to trying to actually grow a business very quickly. If you meet in that, like you get a Harvard MBA and have worked for, I don't know, JP Morgan for years, but it's just a different type of business. That's all very structured in a certain way. And when you go through one of these exercises, it's trying to get you to think, OK, this is a totally new thing. It's almost like a college trying to-- going back to college and trying to say, this unique piece of business is trying to put together company very quickly and scale very quickly and connect with the right people very quickly. Higher out your team very quickly. So all of that, trying to put all those pieces together, I think it would be very good to really do as well as giving that one showing you and connecting each of the right people, especially that up there now and you can help with those type of things. No, I appreciate that. And shout out to G Beta. They are a national program with chapters. They're Charlotte and other cities. I'm very fond of the Charlotte chapter, specifically because I was a resident for three years, most recently relocating the Phoenix. But I still have a lot of affection for the program and we'll continue to support the program through mentorship. So if you are out there, you're thinking about getting involved in an accelerator or an incubator. As Bryce mentioned, they can be valuable support frameworks for the right founder. But I would also encourage you as a mentor in many of these structures to make sure that you go in with intention and you're focused about what you specifically want to get out of the program and make sure you follow through so that you get the kind of support and information that you're looking for. So really appreciate that. Now as we get ready to wrap up Bryce, I really want to kind of give you an opportunity because I think one of the things I love about your story is not only did you start off on an educational and a career path that is not necessarily the path you are now, but you pivot it two or three times. And it's really cool to see, especially at your age and stage that you've done it so many times already. I found that younger founders tend to be a little less willing to pivot off of what they believe was the right idea or the great idea. And like you said, you started off on this coffee journey and you realized the cost and the margins and the logistics may be too prohibitive to really building out of full-scale business. Then you shift to another concept. So talk to me a little bit about what your decision-making process has been in the time frames that you've made that decision to move on and to pivot off of one business and go to another. Yeah, it's always a hard thing to say, situation by situation. I think what the real thing is is trying to find what you're really passionate about. And I've just found more and more kind of gotten more fine tuned towards what I really enjoy doing. I think the baseline was when I went into medical school, I think I imagine to being a doctor more like doctor house where you're coming up with new cures and treated ofitis solutions. Yeah. I think it's really a figure of things out. And that's really what I wanted to do with my life. But we go into real medicine, obviously, a little more average. It's very difficult to memorize everything. But we want to know that not quite that exciting thing. So it was always kind of this idea, like how do I get to do that still? And just kind of following whatever lead that came up and with the coffee thing. Yeah, it was a great taste of all of that kind of general idea. And when you see those margins and you're not a tech company, you need to fix it. So you can fix it or move on. If you're a e-commerce company and you can't get your margins, right? That's kind of a fatal thing there. So it is. Yeah, you got to do. And then from the tech perspective, I think I knew I still wanted to be in medicine and kind of innovating in medicine. But when I went into that, it was like, I didn't know if I could do it yet. I didn't know if I could stoke bill AI doctors or whatever they say is a big word. But there's this funny Steve Jobs quote, "Tame, that's switched out." He says, all of these things are invented and built by people in those smarter than you. So it's like, nobody really knows for sure. I think that it's really like an iteration of the Play-Doh quote that I like. I know that I'm nothing. Yep, yep. There is no genius inventing AI doctor that told every single aspect about it. There are just some people that really got on board and have the background and got my background more. Seasoned and sharpened in that area. So once I kind of learned even all of the tech side, they're met the company, I knew like, oh wow, I can't just do this. You know, nothing's really stopping me or they always think about that. The Jobs quote and really just an iteration of the original Play-Doh quote, but it is true. It's so scary until I had to use my way into it for years. But then eventually you get there. I think, yeah.
I mean, I don't know, I don't know everything. I certainly still make errors, but I feel like I know a lot more about it now than I did before. - And I'm going to stay with that because it is actually excellent advice and I agree with you on that pool there. I know that I know nothing is something that a lot of people say, right, maybe not verbatim, but a lot of people walk around and say it to themselves on a daily basis. And if you're talking to a potential entrepreneur or even somebody in a medical professional who's potentially thinking about pivoting like you did, what is the one piece of advice you would say in terms of where you start? What's the first step to take when you feel like I don't know enough? I'm right, I know that I know nothing. What's the first step? What would you say? - Yeah, for me, it really is just going for it. I think there's this kind of interesting theory that like, any action is better than no action because at least you're collecting more data towards what maybe the right action. So if you take any action-- - Yeah, I'm in the wrong action. You now have more data points towards what the right action is, just because you took in action. So I think it kind of like, I joke that trying to become an entrepreneur and trying to learn about it, reading a book on entrepreneurship is like reading a book on how to play basketball. And that it might help a little, but really what you should have to go through. - You're going to get out here. - Yeah, he's just out of jokes. So he can read some books along the way about form and tune that up a little bit. But if you tell a free book about playing basketball, you're not going to go play against for Broadway. (laughing) - So it's kind of the same thing with entrepreneurship. And to be there, it was like very small. Like I think I learned so much from my coffee company. Like you could start, I don't know. If you're like collecting baseball cards, you could start a little business I didn't sell baseball cards. You know, it doesn't have to be AI dogs. - It's huge scale, yeah, the idea. - Yeah, yeah. - But I learned so, I probably, like the Delta, the change between what I knew from when I had no business background and when I started my coffee company was larger there between those two than it was like coffee company to now. Like just even in entrepreneurship was like, oh wow, I learned so much. So yeah, it's kind of get your foot in the door. Let's go for it. - Look man, I really appreciate all of the answers that you have provided today. This has been a really dope conversation. And I appreciate you really pulling the curtain back on kind of the mystique around, especially health tech, right? I think a lot of people approach mid tech, health tech, ed tech with a bit of more apprehension because it feels like it's only for the professionals and you need to have some sort of, you know, engagement in the space. You can't just jump into it, right? And I know things are moving fast. So we really appreciate the information that you shared here today. But obviously want to allow my audience to continue to follow you. So can you share your various links and ways that people can reach out and connect with you after the show? - Yeah, definitely. So our website is openscope.com and then I'm on Instagram and TikTok. My hand will be at the medtech.com and we also have our @umpinscopehealth page number below. And then yeah, if anybody wants to shoot me an email, be it still free. My email is
[email protected] and I think that's all we have. (laughing) - Check your rapid viral on those out there. But yeah, definitely feel free to reach out or anything like that. - Well, you've heard him here. First audience, we will have all of those links available for you in the show notes in this episode. So you can check there now. You can also find his information on the brand blueprint.biz, not.com because we're about that biz. We will have a profile page up for Bryce and where you will be also able to link with Bryce and to follow his journey as he continues to innovate in AI and healthcare. But as let's face it guys, this space is moving fast. And even I am sure the features that we're shared today will likely be more advanced and more developed in the next several months. So make sure you go out there, follow Bryce and openscope. And as always, as I always say, make sure if you got value from this conversation, share, like, or follow. If you don't do that, I tend to think you might be a hater. You don't want to be a hater. So make sure you go ahead and share this with somebody who you think could benefit from this conversation and from all the great advice that Bryce provided us today. This is the Blaine Brewcliffe. I'm Dana Amin's and thank you for hanging out with us again. We'll see you on our next episode and remember as always. If you're out there, you're trying to innovate, try to make a brand happen. Check us out at the brand blueprint. Thanks again and have a great week.
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