Fabienne Cotte: Managing Clinical Trials While Surfing in Asia

05/26/23 • 62 min

Things we talked about

How she got her first job in digital health already during her studies
Why she decided to continue working in digital health upon graduating versus working in a hospital
How it’s like to work from Bali: Surfing, productivity, time zone differences, coworking spaces
Why working in a different time zone makes her more productive
An example of a study they did in Tanzania which compared mid-level healthcare professionals using software versus physicians without software (with very interesting results)
How a typical work day looks like for her
How she had to start managing people a few months in to her job
Why she’s considering going back to work in the hospital to work as a physician in Dermatology some time in the future

Fabienne on LinkedIn.
Ada Health: Where Fabienne currently works. A healthcare company in Berlin developing a symptom checker. Note that Matthew Fenech, a prior guest on this podcast, also worked at Ada Health, and I also worked there as Ada was my first consulting customer back in 2020.

How she got her first job in digital health already during her studies
Why she decided to continue working in digital health upon graduating versus working in a hospital
How it’s like to work from Bali: Surfing, productivity, time zone differences, coworking spaces
Why working in a different time zone makes her more productive
An example of a study they did in Tanzania which compared mid-level healthcare professionals using software versus physicians without software (with very interesting results)
How a typical work day looks like for her
How she had to start managing people a few months in to her job
Why she’s considering going back to work in the hospital to work as a physician in Dermatology some time in the future

Fabienne on LinkedIn.
Ada Health: Where Fabienne currently works. A healthcare company in Berlin developing a symptom checker. Note that Matthew Fenech, a prior guest on this podcast, also worked at Ada Health, and I also worked there as Ada was my first consulting customer back in 2020.

How he got into evoluationary biology
How become the first doctor to join the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology as a researcher
His research on modelling cancer in software
Why he moved back from the US (doing research at the Cleveland Clinic) to Germany
How he managed to leave research to join the startup industry, getting his job at Bulbitech
What he did at Bulbitech: Detecting diseases through eye movements
Why writing skills are so important

Luka on LinkedIn
CancerSim: The software (python package) which Luka co-developed for the simulation of cancer.
Bulbitech: The startup Luka worked at, building software for detecting diseases through eye movements.

Why Johan first worked as a doctor but then left the hospital because working as a doctor doesn’t scale and it’s hard to have a larger impact
Why it’s hard to change a hospital from inside
His first job (scholarship) after leaving the hospital which was about identifying problems in hospitals and how to solve them
Building his first own Healthtech company producting wearable sensors for patients in hospitals
Being a professional poker player, doing that during medical school, and what made him stop
How the knowledge of poker is useful in other aspects of life
Why he didn’t aim for good “grades” in exams
What a product manager actually does and how to learn it
Why many doctors underestimate their usefulness
“The rise and fall of Europe’s largest telemedicine provider”
Working at Kry while it grew from 60 to 1.200 people
In which areas you could build successful Healthcare companies now
What he’s doing at his own company, 4scale, now
The pros and cons of venture capital (VC) funding for startups

Johan on LinkedIn.
Johan on Substack where he publishes his writing: Big world - Small world and Mini mental models.
4scale Ventures: Johan’s company which he co-founded. They support companies to reach their ambitions on growth efficiency and leadership. They also invest in companies and offer consulting and coaching.
womanly: The female health ecommerce startup which Johan is currently building.
Kry: Telemedicine company where Johan was the director of product. Kry is available in Sweden, Germany, Norway, France and the UK (slight correction here as I didn’t mention the UK in the podcast).