A note to our community
Where we've been and where we're headed.
TLDR: Our community is evolving to help more builders beyond NYC. Please engage with my LinkedIn posts over the next two weeks.
Hi Everyone.
For 5 years, I’ve run a mailing list of NYC digital health events and organized curated workshops on topics that regularly impale founders and builders in digital health. My consistent theme has been
Only new mistakes.
Healthcare is hard enough as it is. If a founder in our community repeats a mistake that I, one of our more experienced operators, or the research literature could have predicted that’s a failure on my part as a mentor and convener. The various workshops and round-tables I’ve hosted over the years have functioned to bridge that gap.
The workshops have been fantastic, but had two failings that were intrinsic to their form factor.
The workshops were ephemeral.
Aside from a slide deck, there was never an actionable artifact that you could take from “Selling to Health Plans” workshop on a Thursday night on Union Square into a GTM strategy session on Monday morning.
By the same token, there was nothing substantive that you could forward to your friend who could have gotten value but was home changing diapers.
The workshops were geographically constrained.
I firmly believe that current NYC is the best place in history to build healthcare innovation.
At the same time, I have persistently gotten messages from builders around the world asking for recordings or captures of our conversations.
These are folks who I genuinely want to support, but zoom conferences and recording our panels would have broken what made the events special.
The answer to both of those tensions is a new subscription series that I will be publishing starting June 1st called Healing Healthtech Field Guides. Each Field Guide will focus on a specific operational topic that I’ve seen make or break digital health startups. Each Field Guide will distill decades of research literature, anecdotes from builders and investors who have operated at population scale, regulatory framings, and clinical guidelines into actionable workflows, references, and best practices you can start implementing on Monday morning.
Over the next two weeks until the first Field Guide goes live, I will be sharing content and takeaways that I believe are deeply impactful to builders and operators.
My ask of you until then is that when you see these posts on LinkedIn and X, please engage with them.
Like, repost, comment, agree, disagree.
Tell me when my opinions conflict with your lived experience as an operator, provider, patient or caregiver. Insult my taste in suede vintage-inspired sneakers. It’s all good. The goal is to have a meaningful and active conversation.
The NYC Events Roundup will continue after NY Tech Week and remain free. You’ll have the ability to choose whether you get the Field Guides, the Events Roundup, or neither here on Substack. In terms of events, I’m pivoting to 20-30 roundtable roundtables and dinners. The 100+ person events at midtown law firms were both exhilarating and exhausting to run. I will do a few of those a year, but fortunately, we now have a thriving community of new NYC healthtech community organizers who have taken up that mantle and whose events I have been very happy to promote since day 1.
Lastly, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
It’s been a privilege to support your work for all these years and I hope to continue to do so for a long time to come.
Warmly,
Vadim
Only new mistakes.