Johan Hedevåg: Ex-Director of Product at Kry, Founding Partner at 4scale Ventures, Professional Poker Player

06/02/23 • 65 min

Medical Misfits

Things we talked about

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

Links As Mentioned In The Podcast

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).

Things we talked about

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

Links As Mentioned In The Podcast

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).

Previous Episode

Fabienne Cotte: Managing Clinical Trials While Surfing in Asia

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

Links As Mentioned In The Podcast

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.

Next Episode

Stephen Gilbert: Professor for Regulatory Science

Stephen’s Biography

Stephen Gilbert is a veterinarian and professor for regulatory science at the University Hospital Dresden. Before that, he worked as a regulatory affairs manager specializing in clinical evaluation at Biotronik in Berlin, a large and established medical device manufacturer, and then for at Ada Health, also in Berlin, as director of clinical studies and clinical evaluation. Initially, after graduating as a veterinarian in 2001, he worked as a veterinarian and veterinary surgeon for around 10 years in the UK. In addition to studying veterinary sciences a the University of Glasgow, he did a Master’s Degree in Biomathematics, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Leeds, and followed that up with a PhD in computational biology.

Things we talked about

Why he stopped working as a vet: “List-based” work vs. “project-based” work
Learning self-sufficiency as a vet while having to perform all sorts of operations after graduating
How he was involved in handling the food and mouth disease outbreak and how that relates to project management
Transitioning into “wet lab” scientific research and simulations
How he joined Biotronik, a medical device manufacturer based in Berlin, and worked there to acquire the first-ever CE certificate for a medical device under the new Medical Device Regulation
The benefits of doing a Master’s degree and/or PhD as a doctor and which sort of program / research area to look for
We both talked about the German system of doing a “Dr. med” research degree
What does a Professor of Regulatory Science do? And what is Regulatory Affairs?
The “implant files” which led to the uncovering of implants which caused harm in patients and their effect on subsequent medical device regulation
Are we over-regulating medical devices? Do we even have any data to answer that question?
AI in Healthcare: Chances and risks of ChatGPT and large language models (LLMs)
LLM medical software currently on the market, their features and considerations whether they are medical devices