

Big Picture Medicine
Mustafa Sultan, MD
The health entrepreneurship podcast — focusing on big picture stuff.
Interviews with health/biotech entrepreneurs and leaders having impact at scale. Health stuff a techbro/sis would find interesting. Think health meets the Tim Ferriss Show.
Get in touch: [email protected]
Interviews with health/biotech entrepreneurs and leaders having impact at scale. Health stuff a techbro/sis would find interesting. Think health meets the Tim Ferriss Show.
Get in touch: [email protected]
Episodes
Mentioned books

May 27, 2026 • 1h 1min
#141 $1.1B exit... then a MedTech with 12mo of runway called — Joe DeVivo (Butterfly Network)
Part 2 with Joe DeVivo, the MedTech CEO who sold InTouch to Teladoc for over $1B and promised himself never to do another turnaround. Two years later, the board of Butterfly Network called w/12mo cash left. Here's how he did it.

May 11, 2026 • 49min
#140 Should the NHS Trigger the £330M Palantir Break Clause? An Insider's Take
Tom Bartlett spent 22 years inside the NHS. For three and a half years, he led the 150-person engineering team at NHS England that built the £330M Federated Data Platform with Palantir.He left a month ago and he's the only insider speaking publicly about what the platform actually does, what it costs, and whether the NHS has any credible alternative.We cover the architecture, the cost, the CLOUD Act, the BMJ exposé, the conflicts of interest at Chelsea & Westminster, and whether ministers should trigger the break clause.

May 9, 2026 • 39min
🔥News: The New Healthcare AI Broker, Palantir Under Fire and Big Tech's Drug Discovery Mirage
Jared Dashevsky, MD (Healthcare Huddle) and Ala Alenazi, PhD (Kinnevik) join Mustafa to discuss:The rise of the AI Broker (a middleman that's about to emerge)Palantir's £330M NHS break clauseOpenAI as pharma. We also discuss why drug discovery needs a "Human Genome Project 2.0"

Apr 23, 2026 • 34min
🔥 News: Sequoia's Services Thesis, Kalshi for Clinical Trials and the PCP Apocalypse
Jared Dashevsky, MD (Healthcare Huddle) and Ala Alenazi, PhD (Kinnevik) join Mustafa to discuss:Healthcare spends 75% on services and 3–4% on IT -- yet every AI startup is pitching a copilot. Sequoia's new thesis: the next trillion-dollar healthcare company won't sell software at all. It'll just do the work.The PCP Apocalypse. Urgent care has tripled, PCP density is down 22%, and behavioral health visits just overtook primary care. We debate whether the answer is more PCPs or changing the role.Kalshi for clinical trials. A Stanford PhD built a public market where nine frontier AI models bet on Phase 3 outcomes. Ala calls it "capitalism's final boss" and explains why it might be the most dangerous innovation in pharma this year.

Apr 5, 2026 • 32min
🔥 News: Peptides, OpenEvidence and World Models in Healthcare with Ala Alenazi, PhD and Jared Dashevsky, MD
Jared Dashevsky, MD (Healthcare Huddle) and Ala Alenazi, PhD (Kinnevik) join Mustafa to discuss: The wellness industry is now four times bigger than pharma -- and peptide parties are the new IV drip bars.What's going on there? OpenEvidence built a $12B company on physician search, but everyone's copying the playbook. Is there any moat?World models coming -- and why LLMs might not be enough to fix healthcare.

Mar 30, 2026 • 34min
#139 Oura's $11B Bet, What a Gaming Exec Learned Building in Healthcare (Jason Oberfest — VP Healthcare at Oura)
What can healthcare learn from Candy Crush? A lot. Jason Oberfest (VP Healthcare, Oura) used gaming psychology to build a first-of-its-kind digital health company (backed by Kleiner Perkins) — as well as roles at MySpace, Apple and more. Now he's bringing that playbook to Oura, following their $11B valuation and booming growth. LinksJason Oberfest: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonoberfest/Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/

Feb 11, 2026 • 31min
#138 Six Lessons On Building a $100M Healthtech Company (Steve Kraus — Bessemer Venture Partners)
Steve Kraus, a Bessemer partner with two decades in healthcare investing, shares research-backed lessons on scaling healthtech. He talks about designing products that delight end users, tackling activation and clinician friction with ambient AI, navigating long founder-led sales cycles, investing early in customer success, and spotting emerging trends through deliberate information habits.

12 snips
Dec 17, 2025 • 32min
#137 $1.1B MedTech Turnaround CEO – Joe DeVivo (Butterfly Network)
Joe DeVivo, a legendary MedTech CEO known for his turnaround expertise, shares his journey from a family-run business to leading Butterfly Network. He discusses what happens after a $1.1B exit, revealing the unexpected emotional journey that comes with financial security. Joe outlines his strategic turnaround playbook, emphasizing the importance of listening to customers and maintaining focus. He also explains why many founders struggle with scaling and shares insights on effective leadership when replacing them. The conversation is both candid and inspiring.

Oct 13, 2025 • 38min
#136 Nabla, AI Ambient Scribe ($120M Raised) — CEO, Alex LeBrun
In 2023, Alexandre Lebrun pointed two exits in conversational AI at Medicine. Nabla raised $120M and spread to 130+ orgs and 85,000 clinicians in record time. But in the ambient AI game -- it seems like distribution beats all. How will Nabla win?LinksNabla: https://www.nabla.com/Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io

Aug 25, 2025 • 40min
#135 $1.4bn Startup Tackling Loneliness, Papa (CEO, Andrew Parker)
In 2017, Andrew Parker launched Papa with a 1-800 number, offering 'grandkids-on-demand' in Miami. By 2021, the company was valued at $1.4bn (backed by SoftBank and Tiger Global).This is a YC-backed gig economy company operating in the regulated elder care market at unicorn scale. On paper it shouldn't have worked -- and yet it did.LinksPapa: https://www.papa.com/Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io


