📰 Monthly Healthtech Roundup
Welcome to my monthly healthtech roundup, now entering it’s 4th year as a newsletter and its first appearance on Substack.
Hi, I’m Vadim.
Healthtech venture is hard, a fact I’ve learned firsthand as an operator, accelerator director, and investor. I’ve watched too many good teams repeat avoidable mistakes others have already paid for. I write Healing Healthtech to distill research and the experiences of top-tier operators into actionable tactics and frameworks, so we can all aim to make only new mistakes.
Part 1 covers what I published this month on Substack.
Part 2 covers NYC Healthtech events that I’m hosting.
Parts 3 covers the most impactful and informative things that I read in the past month.
Part 4 covers other NYC healthtech events worth a spot on your calendar.
Subscribe for a twice-monthly dispatch of free and paid field guides meant to help you build more deliberately toward something better in human health. And if it’s useful, please forward it to other healthtech builders in your network.
Warmly,
Vadim
Only new mistakes.
✍️ Part 1 — What I Wrote This Month
🎬 Venture Funding for Fun and Profit - Part 1 The Narrative — Free — 20 minutes
The heart of this video is how to build a successful pitch deck for raising angel and preseed funding.
More broadly, its a workshop that I’ve given many times focusing on the meta narrative that creates a fundable company.
My approach to pitch decks and narrative works - 80% of my final 12-team accelerator cohort raised follow-on funding within 3 months of graduation. One got into YC and another has already exited. Historically, we had 300+ teams raise 2.7B into 44 exits.
📊 Join an Accelerator or Nah? — Free — 10 minute read
When a program is worth the equity and when it isn’t; the comet distribution of accelerator outcomes, the hedging-accelerator model, two diligence checks for founder, and my advice from getting the most out of a program that you decide to participate in.
💰 Venture Funding for Fun and Profit - Part 2 The Process — Paid — 45 minute read
Deep dive into the process of running an effective raise.
How to find, qualify, engage with, and close angels and early funds.
How to measure and re-calibrate your raise against benchmarks as you go.
I combine my own anecdotal experiences, data from Docsend, Carta, and Angellist, along with the writings of the best venture investors of the past 20 years into a deeply actionable and practical field guide.
📱 SMS vs. Apps for Effective Digital Health Interventions — Paid — ~30 min
A field guide on when to reach for SMS versus an app in chronic care, built from 75+ clinical trials and operators who delivered at population scale.
🏛️ Anthropic’s Future Looks More Like Oracle Than Google — Free — ~15 min
Argues open weights are compressing frontier API margins, with OpenAI on a Cisco path and Anthropic on an Oracle one, and what that means for healthtech builders.
⚖️ Will My SMS Architecture Survive Scrutiny or Create Liability? — Free — ~5 min
The free, abbreviated edition of the SMS field guide: the four regulatory regimes governing healthcare SMS and six tripwires that turn a compliant program into a class action.
📅 Part 2 — My Events This Month
🍽️ Self-Funded Employer Founders & Funders Dinner | Tribeca, New York City
If you’re building or investing in angel or pre-seed self-funded employer healthcare, please apply to attend. Sponsored by Rho.
Historically, 70%+ of the founders at my F&F dinners have follow-on meetings after the event with 1 or 2 checks resulting.
🗓️ Tuesday, July 7, 2026
⌚ HealthTech Watch Club | TIME+TIDE Watches NYC, 460 Broome St, New York City
One Health Collective x MarkOne Health x Time+Tide gather NYC’s healthcare-ecosystem watch enthusiasts for horology, no pitches. Wear your most interesting mechanical, automatic, or quartz piece (no smartwatches).
🗓️ Thursday, June 25, 2026
✍️ Part 3 — The Best Things I Read in Healthtech This Month
📉 340B Wasn’t Stolen From Rural Hospitals. It Was Built On Their Graves. — Dutch Rojas — ~15 min
Follows where the 340B spread actually landed, naming five publicly traded chains and PBMs rather than the safety-net communities Congress wrote the program for, plus the dual-classification loophole that let urban hospitals qualify as rural.
🐄 How Farmers are Smarter than Doctors — Lara Zibners — ~3 min
Uses livestock veterinary practice to show how far human medicine lags on women’s reproductive and vaginal health.
This one really isn’t as off-color as it might seem. A founding patriarch of reproductive endocrinology once gleefully walked me through how both the devices and procedures in his field owe more to animal husbandry than human medicine.
Lara is a heck of a clinician scientist and well worth the follow and read.
🏗️ It’s time to build (in Medicaid) — Youssef Kalad — ~13 min
Makes the operator case for building inside an $880B program most founders avoid, with field notes on navigating the bureaucracy.
Youssef isn’t an idle bystander. As healthtech investment principal at AlleyCorp, he led investments into several current rocket ships in the portfolio that work with Medicaid-heavy panels, including Altitude, Birches, and Stepful.
🧠 Mental Health AI Is Operating Without Clinically-Informed Safety Standards. That Should Alarm Us — Scott Wallace, PHD — ~15 min
Proposes a seven-part architecture of enforceable safety standards for mental health AI, grounded in documented patient deaths and existing clinical frameworks like ASL-MH.
🩺 The Dangerous Practitioner: on miscalibrated confidence in medicine — Graham Walker MD — ~10 min
Defines the “dangerous” clinician as one whose confidence outruns competence with no outward signal of the gap, and shows why medicine’s safety systems (consults, escalation, supervision) all depend on someone recognizing where their competence ends. The calibration frame maps directly onto the question of when to trust a confident AI.
I’m placing this Scott and Graham’s piece above right next to Byron’s piece on purpose, as a counterpoint: the case for caution right before the case for urgency.
💊 Our Penicillin Moment — Byron Crowe — ~7 min
Argues the evidence for medical AI’s benefit is now strong enough that continued delay carries its own moral cost.
Byron is CMO of Doctronic, which runs the first state-approved autonomous AI prescription program in the U.S., currently limited to prescription renewals in Utah under a graduated-autonomy model.
🎓 The Old World Is Dying — Jasmine Sun — ~12 min
Career advice for the class of 2026 entering an AI-disrupted job market, useful for anyone weighing where durable work comes from.
I graduated during the last recession and now teach digital health venture design to graduate students pursuing MPA, MHA, and MPH degrees. Like many, I’ve been struggling with what to advise new alums in the face of AI emergence. This piece reached me by way of Youssef (above).
💸 How much I’ve made angel investing — an update — Halle Tecco — ~5 min
Publishes a full deal-by-deal angel track record (0.89x cash returned on $2.9M across 53 investments) and benchmarks it against Carta fund data, a rare unvarnished look at returns.
Halle is easily the best-connected US healthtech angel of the past 25 years, and her openness about portfolio performance (or lack thereof) is badass.
Get her book.
📅 Part 4 — NYC Healthtech Community Events
🤖 Healthcare in the Age of AI | New York City
UJA’s Healthcare Division hosts a panel on how AI is reshaping care across clinical, technical, and business functions.
🗓️ Monday, June 15, 2026
🏛️ Civic Health Forum 2026 | Civic Hall, New York City
A half-day convening of providers, policymakers, investors, and founders built around one question: how do we keep people healthy before they enter the healthcare system? Co-hosted by Fedcap, Digital Health Hub Foundation, and StartUp Health.
🗓️ Tuesday, June 16, 2026
🍹 NY–IL Digital Health Community Happy Hour | New York City
An evening bringing together Israelis and allies building healthcare software, with rapid-fire startup pitches alongside the drinks and networking.
🗓️ Wednesday, June 17, 2026
❤️ An Evening of Courage, Connection & Purpose (KuraHealth) | New York City
An intimate talk on grief and resilience at the residence of economist Nouriel Roubini, featuring Kevin Hines, one of the few to survive a jump from the Golden Gate Bridge.
🗓️ Thursday, June 18, 2026
🎨 Art in the Education Lab: “The Shape of Memory” by Maya Ciarrocchi | New York City
The unveiling of the 2026 Art in the Education Lab commission by artist Maya Ciarrocchi.
🗓️ Thursday, June 18, 2026
🥂 The Art of emPOWERment: Ultimate FO Happy Hour | New York City
The 13th event in the Art of Empowerment series, a curated family-office happy hour where founders, allocators, and investors discuss where they put capital and energy to work. Hosted with EisnerAmper.
🗓️ Thursday, June 18, 2026
😎 Summer Chill (HIVE) | New York City
A HIVE healthcare networking evening for clinicians, administrators, and healthcare leaders built around intentional conversation and connection.
🗓️ Thursday, June 18, 2026
🧠 BrainHealth: VC Panel + GTM Bootcamp | FINN Partners, 1675 Broadway, Midtown NYC
A practical session on go-to-market strategy for brain-health innovation, with lessons from CEOs and institutional BrainHealth VCs. Moderated by Richard Hatzfeld of FINN Partners.
🗓️ Monday, June 22, 2026
🚀 AI Engineers Presents: Founders to Follow | New York City
Intimate conversations with NYC startup founders about their journeys, including Tyler Johnson (Tennr) and Aditya Maru (Blacksmith).
🗓️ Wednesday, June 24, 2026
⚖️ Digital Health Market NYC Symposium | Nixon Peabody, 55 W 46th St, New York City
A CTeL and Nixon Peabody roundtable bringing together digital health leaders, investors, and policymakers on the regulatory, data, and AI deployment dynamics shaping market growth and M&A.
🗓️ Thursday, June 25, 2026
🌇 Pepper Community Hang: Vessel Sunset Walk + Tapas | Vessel, Hudson Yards, New York City
A golden-hour walk around the Vessel followed by tapas and drinks, hosted by Pepper NYC’s health/tech community.
🗓️ Thursday, June 25, 2026
💻 Healthcare x AI Hackathon | NYC | New York City
A 1.5-day hands-on hackathon to build real AI tools and agents for healthcare, for engineers, PMs, and founders working in regulated spaces. Partners include Baseten, Lovable, ElevenLabs, Upfront Ventures, Frist Cressey Ventures, and Aegis Ventures.
🗓️ Friday–Saturday, June 26–27, 2026
🏙️ Health Tech Startup Networking Rooftop Happy Hour | New York City
Rooftop networking for health tech startup professionals over drinks and skyline views.
🗓️ Tuesday, June 30, 2026
🧬 NeuroNYC GP/LP Happy Hour | New York City
A curated evening for GPs and LPs active in or exploring neurotech, mental health, brain-computer interface, and neurodegenerative disease, held the night before the NeuroTech Summit.
🗓️ Wednesday, July 15, 2026
🌟 Health2Tech NYC | New York City
An exclusive digital health gathering hosted by Bailey Morgan, with a guest talk and extended networking.
🗓️ Thursday, July 16, 2026
⚓ Ship It 2026 (Healthcare Software Engineering Conference) | New York City
An invite-only Out-Of-Pocket summit for software engineers in healthcare: 80 curated guests, 12 hands-on workshops, and tactical talks over panels. Two-plus years of healthcare experience expected.
🗓️ Thursday–Friday, September 17–18, 2026
⏰ Deadline to apply: July 1, 2026