Medsider: Learn from Medtech and Healthtech Founders and CEOs - Solving for Healthcare’s Broken Doorway: Interview with OnMed CEO Karthik Ganesh

Episode Date: June 1, 2026

In this episode of Medsider Radio, we sat down with Karthik Ganesh, CEO of OnMed.OnMed is the healthcare technology company behind OnMed CareStation, a “Clinic-in-a-Box” designed to expand access to primary and urgent care. Before OnMed, Karthik served as CEO of EmpiRx Health, leading the company through rapid growth and a successful private equity transaction in 2021. Throughout his career, he’s held leadership roles at QualCare, CareAllies, and Aetna, and advised healthcare organizations through Deloitte and EY.In this interview, Karthik discusses why hybrid care models still require a human touch, how enterprise healthcare buyers evaluate value propositions differently, why brand and culture should shape execution early, and how operating under constraints can sharpen innovation.Before we dive into the discussion, I wanted to mention a few things:First, if you’re into learning from medical device founders and CEOs and want to know when new interviews are live, head over to Medsider.com and sign up for our free newsletter.And if you’re ready to level up your medtech game, you should check out Medsider Courses — 8-week masterclasses covering topics like fundraising, M&A and exit planning, design and development, clinical and regulatory strategy, and commercialization.These courses, featuring hard-earned lessons from elite medtech CEOs, can be purchased individually or come free with our All-Access Pass.If you'd rather read than listen, here's a link to the full interview with Karthik Ganesh, which includes a link to ScottBot — an AI version of host Scott Nelson trained on every Medsider interview and playbook. Feel free to ask ScottBot any questions you'd like!KEY MOMENTS FROM THE INTERVIEW(03:04) - Karthik’s obsession with healthcare access, and the “broken doorway” problem behind OnMed (05:51) - How OnMed combines telemedicine and brick-and-mortar care into a “Clinic in a Box” (09:04) - The OnMed metrics that surprised Karthik most, including a 37% patient return rate, and the reasons behind the company’s success (09:22) - What OnMed designed differently after realizing that patients approach healthcare with their guard up (15:27) - The pitfalls of B2C healthcare and how OnMed was built as a B2B company by intention (22:01) - How Karthik reshaped OnMed around clarity, structure, and high performers (30:23) - What “brand” actually means to Karthik (39:37) - How OnMed tailored its value proposition for payers, providers, employers, and universities (45:45) - Karthik’s fundraising philosophy: constraints keep companies inventive

So I have consistently believed, and it shows up in my execution, that brand and culture are more important than strategy. You have to be crystal clear about your North Star. You have to be crystal clear about vocalizing that North Star with your team as well as the market at large. You have to know what you're coming for. Your brand needs to stay two steps ahead of your strategy. So one, you've got to be very clear about your brand. Then you've got to build a company and have people in it that, one, understand the Nordstar, to embrace it completely.

And three, are trained to play to their strengths. Welcome to MedSider, where you can learn from the brightest founders and CEOs in medical devices and health technology. Join tens of thousands of ambitious doers as we unpack the insights, tactics, and secrets behind the most successful. life science startups in the world. Now here's your host, Scott Nelson. Hey everyone, in this episode of Medsider, we sat down with Carthick Ganesh, CEO of OnMed. OnMed is a healthcare technology company behind the OnMed Care Station, a clinic in a box designed to expand access to primary and urgent care. Before OnMed, Carthic served as CEO of MPRX Health and led the company through rapid growth and a successful private equity transaction in 2021. Throughout his career, he's held

leadership roles at QualCare, Care Allies, and Aetna, and advised healthcare organizations through Deloitte and EY. Here are a few topics we explored in this conversation. First, what keeps patients coming back to a highly automated care experience? Second, how do you convert company culture from philosophy to execution? Third, how do you tailor ROI and success metrics for different health care stakeholders? And last, what does high performance culture actually look like in startups? Before we dive into the full episode, if you're a MedTech founder or CEO preparing to raise capital, you should check out the Medsider fundraising cohort. This four-week live workshop combines small group sessions with real-time feedback to help you sharpen your investor story,

build a targeted investor pipeline, and run a focused fundraising sprint instead of a never-ending slog. Over the month, you'll walk away with an investor-ready narrative and deck, outreach scripts that actually get responses, a refreshed LinkedIn profile, a simple content plan that keeps you on investors' radar, and a repeatable system for running your raise. You can join the waitlist at Medsider.com forward slash fundraising cohort. Again, that's Medsider.com forward slash fundraising cohort. All right, let's get to the interview. All right, Carthick, welcome to Medsider Radio.

Appreciate it coming on. Scott, thank you for having me on. And thanks for being patient as we had to reschedule this a few times. But certainly looking forward to learning a little bit more, not only about yourself and your journey, but also what you're building at OnMed. So with that said, I recorded a very abbreviated bio at the outset of this episode. But let's start there.

I want to hear it kind of from your mouth. What's the one to maybe two-minute overview of your career kind of before taking on the CEO role? I would say two things that stand out career-wise for me. One, I'd like to think I've touched healthcare from all the angles it could have been touched from. Without being a physician myself, I've had the privilege of running a TPA, a health plan, a PBM, helped stand up and operate a value-based care company, and now, you know, essentially building pretty much ground up a care. delivery organization. So the journey has been fascinating, a lot of lessons learned and best

practices along the way. So as I think back, I look back in my career, I feel the superpower this journey has given me, if you will, is the ability to cross-pollinate. So that's one. And second, the journey that brought me to OnMed, I found the last maybe 10, maybe 15 years, I've had this, I'm going to call it an unhealthy obsession with access. We are paranoid as a country about all the things that happen after the person falls sick. And, well, X percentage of the people control, Y percentage of the spend. Listen, you can't get healthcare to people

if people can't access it to begin with. So worried about and so focused on all the rooms in the house and upgrading the kitchen and upgrading the master bedroom. We just forget, listen, the doorway is broken. There's 120 million Americans who have no viable access to care, 167 million who continue to delay care. And those are just the numbers we know. Those aren't even the worst case scenario. And that's the journey I'm on. That's what excites me about what I'm doing and what OnMed's doing right now. Yeah. I definitely want to get into both topics in more detail

because you do have, I would say, a very robust sort of background in terms of, you know, touching a lot of different areas of health care, which I think stood out, you know, when we were kind of going through our, putting together our research notes. But the access thing is really interesting too. I just had Connie Lehman on the program. She's the CEO of Clarity. Dr. Conner, she's an interventional radiologist by background, but she's running Clarity. She's found of the company. And we were talking about the same issue because their technology is an AI kind of layer that sits on top of like mammograms. And you were talking about access and how this is opening up access to a lot of different patients. And she's still a practicing physician at Beth Israel in Boston.

I think that's right. I'm pretty sure. But she had to like reschedule like a primary care visit. And it took like six months, right? So to your point, I mean, it's definitely a big issue. So I'm looking at your website right now, which is onmed.com, exactly as it stands. OnMed.com. If you're listening to the program, we'll link to it in the full write-up. But if you don't get there, very simple URL, OnMed.com. Really interesting, I should say, product and experience, for those that have never heard of it and are new to OnMed. Talk to me like I'm a, I'm a, I'm a freshman in high school. What is it? What are you solving for? You're on the screen with me. If you were in the room with me, I would tell you to close your eyes and take the journey with me, but here's

what we're solving for. We've got two, the two modalities of care that exist today. As we know of them and as we think of them, on med exists, but the two modalities are the most prevalent. One, the traditional brick and mortar, very expensive to stand up, but more importantly, according to the AMA, the medical association, we needed 200,000 more docs as of five years ago. We're producing about 17,000 a year, and about 40 to 50% of everyone who's practicing today is either a pre-retiree or has claimed they're burnt out coming out of COVID. So as we think about the brick and mortar world, the clinic world, and I'm talking about this broadly, OnMed is really primary care, urgent and a lot of post-acute, but broadly, we're running out of clinicians as a country. That's

the brick and mortar. You look at the telemedicine aspect of it, Scott. I mean, you're familiar with this obviously, 75 million Americans with less than viable broadband, 45 million with no broadband. And you look at no vitals, no scans, no biometrics, no real way to engage the patient clinically has absolutely created a sealing for telemedicine as a pure play. Right. And we see this even with the federal government, not essentially sealing this, sealing telemedicine as a modality in law, as we would have hoped it would have been coming out of COVID. So you've got these two modalities. You can't throw the baby out with a bathwater.

Each one brings a set of strengths and each one brings a very inherent set of weaknesses. The brick and mortar, the psychological comfort that comes from going into a clinic, the comprehensiveness of a clinic visit, telemedicine, the rapid scalability. We have taken the both of these, blended them, and created a clinic in a box.

The experience is extremely simple, extremely intuitive. And if you're a freshman in college, this isn't a lot of colleges across the country today. So you walk into it or roll into it. If you're in a wheelchair, it's wheelchair accessible. It's an 8 feet by 10 feet container. The bulk of the floor is a weighing scale. So even if you're in a wheelchair,

it knows exactly how to deduct the weight and handle your weight as a part of that. There's a 65-inch screen in front of you that has a gigantic thing in the middle that says start. You press start. The clinician shows up on the screen. She confirms you're ready for the visit. The door shuts.

the glass fogs. You're now in a private, secure, soundproof environment. She takes your vitals. You've got thermal scans going on that are automatically looking for any level of congestion. There's infrared cameras to make sure that your temperature is being checked, height, weight, being checked as a part of this blood pressure cuff, pulse ox. She takes your information. You tell her what's going on with you. She can deploy a digital step. She can deploy an odoscope. She can deploy a high-deaf camera. All these devices, the hardware, she can remote control the entire care station. She can dim the lights, increase the, you know, brighten the lights, reduce the sound, control the devices, draw them down, draw them up.

She can do everything with the care station remotely. And you go through your visit, you're asked a bunch of questions along the way, you're being taken care of. The key stats for us, 86% of the people who come into the care station do not need a specialist referral coming out of it. We're able to take care of them completely. They need to go no place else. 54% tell us that if they had not come to the care station, they would have gone to the ED.

78% tell us that we are their medical home. 37% return rate to the care station after the first visit within the first 12 months, which is a higher patient provider stickiness factor than any other aspect of health care in America today. The only things that are stickier than that are the kid with the pediatrician, which is more, I'm going to say more school-mandated vaccinations, etc. or if you've got a very specific disease, if I've got cancer, I have a relationship with my oncologist. The stickiness there is the disease, not the doctor. The 37% is an incredibly solid return number.

And most importantly, we're rolling this out in underserved communities across the country, rural, suburban, urban. Underserved communities where there isn't an insurance mandate to come back, there isn't a you need to come back because here's your stick if you don't come back. None of that. They're coming back because they're comfortable. The tech isn't overwhelming them. The last mile is human delivered. And they're coming back because they've got the psychological safety and the comfort that they're getting taken care of. And that's the entire experience. I mean, once the visits done, the door shuts, UVC is deployed. Every surface in the care station, including the devices, is completely sanitized. And then the door opens for the next person to come in. That's pretty impressive. Even just taking a step back, because you roll out, you rattled off some some really impressive statistics around the adoption and the stickiness of this, of this experience. But one of my interventional cardiology buddies in mind, we were talking about a very similar problem, right, generally speaking, kind of access and where we're headed, like, as a country, at least here in the U.S. And one of his comments that stuck with me, there was like from a

couple years ago, he was like, he was like, this is what I'm telling like my friends and close family. He's like five, 10 years from now, hopefully you're really, good friends with a physician because it's going to be hard because there's like the shortage is very very real you know and obviously he's he's in a big health system and so it just it just stood out to me and I think it's so easy to gloss over right now but like fast forward 10 years from now it's very on absolutely and you know the for all of the folks Scott right who AI is a big part of what we do AI is subvert we're doing AI from a workflow standpoint a megentic standpoint or data mode population health analytics is all

AI driven, right? But our last mile is human delivered. And for all of the folks, you know, who tell me, well, Karthik, we're moving to a world of AI and bots, et cetera. I'm like, listen, the 167 million people we're talking about here do not live in the world of AI and bots and variables. They just don't. These are folks who are working two, three jobs sometimes just to stay afloat. If I'm one of those people and I fall, and I have a tickle in my throat tonight, or I feel like I'm running a fever, I could be missing out on three shifts worth of work tomorrow if I try showing up someplace, if I even get an appointment. Does that mean I don't pay my rent this month?

Does that mean I don't buy my groceries this week? Do I not refill my prescriptions? Do I not pay my utility bill? This is so fundamental, the immediacy of comprehensive care is so fundamental to a person's quality of life and their sense of well-being. And I feel for the richest and most powerful, country on the planet, this should be a given. Yeah.

The last mile being human touch, I want to ask you a little bit more about that experience. But I think it's critical. I think it's really important because even if you were an early adopter of like a lot of these wearable technologies, I'm one of those, right? Like I've had an oar ring for a long time. Yeah, I had a boot back in like 2017 or 18 or something back. It's a lot more janky than it is than it is now. But I was, I had the CEO of I bot on the program.

This was a couple months ago, but they're doing like a retinal, you know, scan technology. And he was talking about like the, he sort of did this company, whatever, like seven, eight years ago. And it didn't, it like, they didn't have product market fit. He said, one of the issues was when it comes to health care, like technology enthusiasts lose side of the fact that most people, yeah, they like the efficiency of a quick, you know, a quick scan or something, a quick visit. Like, there's a lack of confidence, right, in having some, some device, right, that doesn't talk to you like a human. And that was a real issue. And so, like, they'd built that into what he's doing now. And I think, I think your point about, you know, there's a human

element here, the last mile, really, really important because it's easy to gloss over. It is. 2000. And I want to say it was 2007 or 2008s got CVS, the CAREmark side of CVS, the PBM side of it. They were investing very heavily in robotics and pill dispensing. And I think at that point, CVS CARMark had about 80 million, 90 million members, something like that. And they moved everyone to mandatory mail. And they said, listen, we want you to get your prescriptions via mail and we're going to default you to mail. And they saw a very, very significant drop in one engagement to refills. They had, in my mind, arguably one of the smartest CMOs in the industry at that point, Helena Falk, who basically said, what gives here? They did the digging in and they realized a couple of

truths that continue to be true. People who were physically able, wanted to be able to get out of their homes, get into their cars or walk if you're in the city, go to your local pharmacy, look the pharmacist in the eye and pick up the prescription. Without that, they did not trust they were going to not be something that would have an adverse effect for them. I have believed this consistently. When we talk about, you know, all the, my journey, all the places I've hit along the way, Scott, I think I've had more lessons learned than best practices coming out of it. biggest lessons learned are one, and I believe this is Americans, but I really think this is more of a global phenomenon, but definitely in America. As consumers, we feel liberated. As patients, we feel

we feel claustrophobic. We feel we're cornered. Someone's out to get us. Someone is going to screw us over, and we don't know where it's going to come from. So let's get our guard up. There's a reason why every focus group says people don't trust our system. That's one. The second lesson learned that we have done very differently with Ahmed is B2C has not worked. B2C cannot, unless you're a wearable company. And listen, I love whoop. I've been wearing this now for four years, I think four years. I love the fact they're going IPO, you know, a billion in ARR, 10 billion IPO value.

I love all of that tomorrow if the Apple Watch comes out and does something very different. There's a lot of people who are going to run away from that 10, that billion. dollar AAR. B2C has not created profitable companies in our American health care system. And this has been a factor. Digital health is not going to be your game changer in terms of creating incredibly profitable, sustainable companies. You might do enough to excite somebody that comes in and writes a really big check and then bankrolls you, like the One Medicals and the Amazons and the Oak Streets and the CVS's. All, you know, I applaud the Amazon's and the CVS's the world for bringing in those constructs and keeping them in the market because we need access

to care, but these are not profitable entities. OnMed is B2B. Our clients, our enterprise clients, we are absolutely obsessed with the patient experience. We want the patient experience to be brilliant, but we are clear-eyed about the fact that the flow of money in our system today flows enterprise down. It doesn't flow patient up. 80% of commercial premiums are picked up by employers, and 80% of all other premiums are picked up by the government. You have to acknowledge that because that's where the flow of money is. That's where the waste of the utilization is. So if you can solve it for them, you're going to bring care effectively into the market.

We are fully expected. We will finish 26 profitable and profitable in a very comfortable way coming out of this. So we are B2B play. And for us, the human delivery being the last mile is absolutely sacrosanct. Wow. That's actually impressive. I would not have thought a what I think is probably a pretty capital intensive business, right, to be profitable this early on. So talk to us a little bit about where you're at now and then we'll maybe go back in time and kind of glean into kind of how how it came to be, right? But we're recording this in Q2 of 26 for those that are listening maybe three, six months later. You're actively, you know, installing these systems. I take it. We're installing these. We're now in seven states. We will have 10 installs in Puerto Rico. in partnership with Triple S. Triple S's traded vision as an example is that they want to plaster the island with care stations to solve access.

The Rural Health Transformation Program, which is the 50 billion that's being pumped into rural America by this administration, we expect to be an oversized player in that. When the applications were rolled out, we were the only named commercial entity in that. The CMS basically said, you know, if you're looking for ideas in terms of how to solve, rural health problems differently, we recommend you look at what OnMed is doing with Auburn University in West Alabama. We expect to be in about 35 plus states coming out of this year. Our clients today are outside of local state federal government, which is where a lot of the rural play comes in. Our clients today are payers, providers, employers, universities, philanthropic organizations.

We have been deployed by these folks inside of, from everywhere. We are inside. We are inside of children centers, community centers, senior centers. Hartford Health Care has put us inside of an airport. We're inside of prisons. We're in a prison in central Texas. We're now going to be entering prisons in Nevada. We're in homeless shelters. We anticipate in the next three months we will be inside of an ER because we are in Tala compliant. The deployments have been fascinating. They continue to prove out our perspective that you need to meet people where they are showing up already, you can't have them come someplace. The results have been staggering. I mean, on an average, we're seeing a 4 to 6x return on an investment for anyone who solves, who's going

in to solve access. And the B2B play for us is, it's a subscription model. So in most of these cases, the person walking into the care station is paying nothing. It's being taken care of by the sponsor, who's our client, and they're still making a 4 to 6x return on it. Wow. It is flowing in through the folks who are, I mean, we know this, right? 5.1 trillion. dollar system, healthcare economists have told us repeatedly the 30% of all utilization is waste. One. Two, ERs are overflowing across the country.

We know ER wait times in some cases are five, six, seven hours. New York Presbyterian in the city here in New York City has the longest wait times. It's published information. I think I'm sharing out of school. Our problem is not that we've got too few ERs. The problem is that 70% of the people who show up at the ER are for non-emergent reasons. They have no business being in the ER, but they are showing up at the ER because they have no place else to go.

And we are, so the way we see ourselves is really being able to provide that first level of care or triage as appropriate to either take care of the patient or then, or if needed, redirect them to the appropriate side of care. Okay, got it. That's really how we've been growing. Yeah. Well, that return is pretty impressive, considering the model seems pretty uniform across the board, whether it's a university that's installing this, an employer, etc.

That would you say a four to six X? For an employer, it actually goes up to 12.5x. Yeah, yeah, I can imagine being incredibly advantageous, right, for an employer, especially not to underappreciate kind of the other, kind of the segments of the market that you're approaching. That's really cool. So I want to spend the next, you know, 20, 30 minutes kind of going back in time and learning a little bit more about, you know, I mean, I know you've been in the helm only

two and a half years, but really kind of more the journey for how OnMed came to be and kind of where it's headed next. And so with that said, I want to, we touch on this at the very outset of our discussion is your broad experience in health care, right? So when you made the decision to come on board, you know, two and a half years ago and take on the kind of the reins as the CEO, were there a few things that, like, you felt really important, like, to either instill in the culture, whether it's change, whether it's reemphasized that the company's doing well, et cetera, and maybe frame that up for other CEOs that are listening to this and are about to embark on that same thing, right?

They're going to go join a company, whether it's a turnaround or whether it's a startup that's reached a different inflection point. Give us a sense for kind of how you approached that transition at Ahmed. It's a great question, Scott. So I have consistently believed, and it shows up in my execution, that brand and culture are more important than strategy. You have to be crystal clear about your North Star. You have to be crystal clear about vocalizing that North Star,

with your team as well as the market at large, you have to know what you're gunning for. Your brand needs to stay two steps ahead of your strategy. Okay. So one, you've got to be very clear about your brand. Then you've got to build a company and have people in it that, one, understand the Nord Star, to embrace it completely, and three, are trained to play to their strengths. So that every single person, whatever the size of the company might be, is, as if they were rowing in one shell as one, right?

They wanted my favorite books as Boys in the Boat. That's exactly how a company should be. So for me, walking into an unmed, the investor who brought me, the investor who really wanted me to come over here was one of my former investors, who had seen how important culture is to me. Because culture to me isn't the fun aspects of things, right? Culture is, it's an equal mix of passion and dispassion. The passion is an unhealthy obsession with where the company is going

and what it wants to accomplish. And we don't say we're very clear at OnMed. We don't have a mission. I see a mission as being stakeholder focused. We have a purpose because what we're doing is societal is much bigger than an individual stakeholder. Ours is a public health play at the end of the day, right? So came in my ask of the board, and the investors at that point was very clear,

which was I needed to have the ability to switch out any aspect of the company, including the board, including. including things in terms of the cap table, cleaning up the cap table. We moved a Florida LLC to a Delaware LLC. We completely cleaned up the cap table in the first three months. We completely redid the governance structure. I want to say at this point in time, it's probably less than 10% of the company,

less than 5% of the company existed, where people who were here before I joined. Needed to bring in people. So starting with leaders, leaders who in some cases have worked with me in the past understand my intensity. It is, I would not want to work for me. And, you know, the things that are important for me in the culture

are a culture of know what ifs. You need to be obsessive about the process. You need to be obsessive about the journey. You can't control the outcome. You can control the journey. So you better do an incredible job with the journey. That's one. Second, a fervent belief that any shackle

we put on ourselves are self-imposed. If we had absolutely no shackles and we could just fly unencumbered, how high could we sort individually? Because this really, at the end of the day, this is an individual play. You know, when people say, you know, there's no eye in team, sure, there's no eye in team.

But if everything is about the team, then you've basically built an incredibly mediocre organization. Everything needs to be about powering the individual to perform at the top of their game, while making them understand that the top of their game only works when they're playing as a part of a team. You can't tell, I come back, you can't tell a Michael Phelps, listen, you've got really long limbs. We think you'd make a great safety or a great wide receiver, but it's just not in the cards for us to build a pool for you. That's bullshit.

It makes no sense. Taylor the role to the person's strengths, challenge them to play at the top of their game, help them amplify their strengths, help them amplify their strengths. help them neutralize their weaknesses, but then don't take any excuses from them as a cop-out. If they cannot, with all of that ammunition, if they cannot perform at an absolutely a rocket ship-like mode, then they are better suited in another organization. So as obsessive as I've been about culture over the years, Scott, retention rates, employee retention rates is not something I look at at all. I look at it and I might be I might come across as being a little blunt but I don't care because I know the highest performers don't care and they're not going anywhere.

This is exactly where they want to be and they respect the fact that we surrounded them with other high performers because listen you know unfortunately talent rolls downhill. A bunch of high performing people and a bunch of mediocre people. The high performers turn mediocre. There was a fascinating experiment conducted by a German scientist. I want to say in the 40s or the 50s, maybe even the 60s, he put his toddler out in a room for nine months with a chimp. And the toddler spent inordinate amounts of time during the day with the chimp. The idea was to see how the chimp became more human-like. Nine months in the toddler was scratching his armpits and sticking his tongue out.

Talent rolls downhill. It doesn't go up. You've got to build uniformity in terms of high performers. So that was important. Hey, everyone. Let's take a quick break to talk about FastWave Medical, the company I co-founded and lead as CEO. We're developing next generation intravascular lithotripsy or IVL systems

to tackle complex calcific disease. Over the last few years, we've closed a series of oversubscribed funding rounds, bringing the total investment into FastWave to over $50 million. Corporate interest in the IVL space is growing to, the $900 million acquisition of Bolt Medical by Boston Scientific in 2025. and Johnson & Johnson's $13 billion acquisition of Shockwave Medical signal a lot of attention on emerging IVL startups like FastWave, and we're making serious progress.

In addition to recently receiving our ninth patent, we've successfully completed peripheral and coronary feasibility studies and are gearing up for pivotal trials. If you're interested in investing in the fast-growing IVL market, head over to FastWavemedical.com forward slash invest. Again, that's fastwavemedical.com forward slash invest. Now let's get back to the conversation. So these were the things that were very clear to me.

I've been very blessed with an investor group that basically gave me the freedom that I needed to have. I've been fortunate to have had a decent track record prior to coming to Ahmed, which lent a lot of confidence in their minds, I would hope. And they've given me the breathing room. And we've taken a company that had been around for about eight years prior to my coming in. I would say I'm going to call it more. Maybe the product's time hadn't come. The product was beautiful.

But the company fumbled a little bit as it was trying to. find itself. The last two years have been a complete redo on every front. It's been two and a half years. It's been a hard reset. The product looks different. The commercialization has been different. The brand is absolutely on fire. We were the top pick at CES and 25. We bookended the year with Times inventions, the best invention of the year. We started off 2026 with we won the Edison Award, which is a global award for infrastructure. Infrastructure deployed for good. We're Impact one winner for products making the highest impact globally. Fast company winner.

The brand has been absolutely on fire. The footprint continues to grow tremendously. We are deploying by October of this year, 60% of our business operations will be run by agents. So we're a very, very heavy clawed shop. AI is inbuilt into a lot of the way we're building out our product and envisioning where it goes. what makes, the reason I threw out the Woop construct out there is because outside of the B2C

versus the B2B that we are, a lot of the other components are not dissimilar. We are also hardware plus software plus devices plus AI plus healthcare. The difference in us with us is a B2B recurring revenue model versus a Woop being a B2C recurring revenue model. Outside of that, it kind of flows the same way. You can probably hear it in our voice. I am just so excited for where we're going. Yeah, I can definitely think, I can,

definitely sense it for sure. I want to ask you a couple of follow-up questions because clearly you're a culture builder, right? And you mentioned a couple things that stood out kind of hearing you riff on this topic is one is that phrase that you used, brand needs to stay two steps ahead of strategy. That's really interesting. When you think about, how do you think about brand, right? Because it can be one of these ambiguous terms. And most people associate brand with like, oh, a marketing campaign. And it's so much different. How do you describe brand? For me, brand is quite simply, when I look at a Disney as an example, Scott. Disney could say, listen, we are the world's largest amalgamation of amusement parks and then you do the entertainment companies. It's boring crap. Disney is the happiest place on earth. You walk into any Disney park anywhere in the world. What strikes you is the number of kids with Make a Wish Foundation

t-shirts showing up there. For a kid whose passing is imminent, for them to feel, Disney is where they want to show up. Disney has created an emotion in people's minds that far surpasses its ownership of an ESPN or anything else it owns in its portfolio. The brand is about the emotion you want to evoke in people. And that emotion, your strategy, your execution, needs to dock into that, the creation,

your product needs to dock into the creation of that emotion. You can't build a strategy, build the product and say, all right, now I'm going to figure out how to get this thing to emote. It doesn't work. You have to build a vision for what that emotion looks like that you're looking to evoke. You have to be able to vocalize that emotion in the market for your company's brand. You have to be able to vocalize that emotion and create that emotion in your employees for your employer brand. And then you need to put the moving pieces in place that dock into it to make that emotion come to life. in my mind, that is the brand staying ahead of the strategy and the execution.

I mean, sometimes it can be this, it's a very general thing. And I think that helps people kind of like at least contextualize kind of what. And I'm right there with you. Like a lot of that, I would share a lot of that same sentiment. Like eventually brand is what your customer, whoever that is, whether it's a consumer, whether it's a business, it's the emotion, right, that they should feel. And there's so many things that impact that emotion and your strategy should be, how do we execute to get to that, to get to get to get to that.

Yeah, to get to get that point. Hearing you kind of also riff on, and I want to get into a lot of these partnerships that you begin to build because it's pretty impressive lineup and the commercial traction is very real at the stage. And what I would consider a relatively short amount of time, two and a half years is not a long time to kind of turn things around and begin to really scale up commercial revenue. But the culture aspect, right? You mentioned kind of this idea of loosening the shackles on people, right? And you said emphasizing, emphasizing strengths and neutralizing weakness. right? Not solving for weaknesses, but neutralizing those and emphasizing strengths. Give me a sense for kind of like what that looks like. Yeah. Every single person in the company. So my last company, Scott, I would tell people all the time that the goal was to create the best version of themselves. And we had gone through COVID together. At this point in time, I mean, I had employees through COVID as an example who would call me and tell me, I'm walking into a grocery store and I'm nervous. So it was that level of comfort. So people were very comfortable just having a conversation. They said, listen, we want to be the best version of ourselves.

But what if we don't know what that looks like? What if we don't, we haven't introspected enough to know what our strengths are? And you realize this repeatedly, right? We, in the workplace more so than any place else, there are no weaknesses because what might be weak in one setting might be a strength in another setting. I come back to the Michael Phelps example. His perceived weakness potentially on a football field could be his strength in a swimming pool, right? So every single person at OnMed and any company I run goes through something called a Clifton Strengths exercise. It's a strength finder exercise, which is not a, it is not a personality assessment.

It literally is a very hardcore AI-driven way of understanding what are your strengths. And equally importantly, what are your blind spots? And whether in life or work, our goal should be, for the best version of ourselves, how do we amplify our strengths? and how do we neutralize our blind spots? You can't obsess over your blind spots. You can't convert those blind spots into strengths because I think that is an absolute irrelevant construct. But all of that comes from fundamentally understanding

and recognizing your strengths and then playing to those strengths. Right? So we have, that's been a really important factor for us in terms of, so every person at Ahmed goes through a strengths finder exercise. They go through, they spend time with, an individual coach who coaches them not on-med,

coaches them individually on what it means for them to play to their strengths and what it means for them to recognize their blind spots so that they're not feeding those blind spots. And then leaders are asked to lead. We don't have performance reviews. I've not believed in performance reviews for a really long time. I think it creates a recency bias that is just absolutely, absolute nonsense. I think I believe the word being a leader is a sacred responsibility.

You fundamentally have the ability to influence how this person operates not just in the workplace but outside of it. A terrible leader creating a frustrated employee. That frustrated employee now takes that frustration over into the home front and life picks up from there. So leadership has to be sacrosanct. It has to be considered a sacred responsibility. And the way you make it sacred is by doing a bunch of different things. One, I mean, people who work with me and for me, know very clearly, they can ask me whatever they want to ask. Every conversation is on the table. They might not like the answers, but they will definitely be treated as an adult. They will definitely have a real conversation

about it. They will definitely get my perspective on it. On that point in time, they know exactly where they stand or where the company stands on that topic. I believe leaders, I see my job as an example is, you know, sometimes people say, well, and I hear a bunch of people who are, who are thought of as leadership gurus talking about, well, your job is not to, your job is to figure out how to support your people. And I think to myself, listen, dude, if you say that, yes, fundamentally, that's motherhood and apple pie. But if you take that to the end degree, you really haven't built anything. And all you're doing is spouting philosophy that doesn't make any sense in the real world. For me, a leader is, especially for CEOs, to your point,

for people who are listening to your podcast, you have to be very clear about the things I called out. You have to be clear about the North Star. You have to be clear about what success looks like for us to attain that North Star. You have to be clear about your journey and you have to be clear about how you measure the journey every step along the way. If you're an athlete, if you're running 100 meter dash, then I see my job as making sure that, Scott, if you're in my team, I draw the white lines for you. You don't stray those white lines. You know, the whole, well, you hire the best people and you get out of the way.

Come on, it doesn't work. You can't build companies by getting out of the way. You draw the white lines. You teach them. You make it very clear what the expectation is. You make sure they have the tools to feed their conditioning and their training. But it is their responsibility to condition themselves. It's their responsibility to train as hard as they can.

they have to run as fast as they can. And while they're running, you might be running alongside them and cheering them every step along the way. But damn it, you're on the field, you're cheering them. And if they step outside those wild lines, there's consequences. And here's what you find about the greatest teams. I look at a Phil Jackson as an example with whether it's the Bulls or the Lakers,

had a bunch of superstars who understood, listen, the triangle offense wasn't optional. that's how they played keep your creativity for your personal court at home bring the triangle offense to the floor when you're playing another team on my watch

the greatest athletes thrive in very clear structure and very clear guidelines in terms of what a win looks like when you give that to them you tell them this is what a wind looks like

and this is how structured we're going to be and these are your guardrails the greatest athletes will figure out a way to make it happen because they are obsessive about their training and their conditioning to get there. If you're loosey-goosey with them, they lose respect for you. Yeah, clarity is king. I can get a sense for that. And my hunch is that because of that culture that you're instilling at OnMed and this

idea of very open, transparent communication, like the answer or not, someone's going to get a real answer from you that probably plays out in leadership meetings, right? There's probably not a lot of wavy hands going on, right? It's like, hey, let's talk about real stuff. Real stuff. And getting to the accuracy of the, you know, of data around a decision, et cetera. And I 100% agree. Like, high performers want that, right?

They want the clarity. They want to understand the parameters and the lines to play within. I'm right there with you. So I know we don't have a ton of time. I want to get to partnerships and a few other topics. You mentioned a few out of the gate, right? A few of the universities. But what stands out to me is like not only the sheer number of partnerships,

but it's a wide variety. You know, you're touching on, you're commercializing in a wide variety of segments. So when you think about some of the success that you've built in a relatively short amount of time, what do you think it takes to kind of, you know, what did it take to kind of prove that OnMed was worthy of the install, right?

Was worthy of them kind of evaluation. Maybe touch on that. And also, it's probably maybe one of the same. What do you think are some of the key things for, you know, for these types of B2B relationships to really work out? Really quick questions. So part one.

that question, Scott, is different entities have different motivations for what a win looks like. So for a payer, a win is a combination of ER diversion. It's a combination of every care station in the ground. Now is another note from a provider network standpoint. As a result, they're bringing their closing provider gaps. They're closing gaps in care because they're bringing every care station can serve as 10,000 patients. So they're closing gaps in care. So as a result, improved heaters scores, improved cap scores as a result of that. at the care station, our NPS is 4.96 out of five. We have incredibly high satisfaction scores from our patients,

which helps payers with their cap scores, their heat is, their stars, etc. That's the payer. For a provider, it's a combination of, again, ER diversion, but also as they take their brand and they put this out into the community, they don't have the horsepower in terms of personnel to be able to stand up clinics in the community and go and put people in there. but the unmet care station branded as them,

allowed them to now have a front door to them, and then steerage back to the mothership. So they've got their metrics in terms of what success looks like. For universities, the success measures have been, how is the care station effectively handling the overflow from the university medical, the university clinic?

What these universities are finding now more and more is, you know, the era of, I'm going to make an appointment with my university, you know, clinic, and show up. Gen Z demands immediacy. Gen Z demands a level of tech-enabled, yet human-delivered empathy. So some of these universities are actually having conversations with us

in terms of taking on an oversized role in terms of student care. And about what they're there. But really, the way we see our role is primarily handle the overflow because all these university clinics are overflowing. And, you know, it's a fact, right? You talked about, I love the freshman, example, you said, hey, I'm a freshman, talk to me about this. That's a fact, right? You know, especially these kids today with chronic conditions, the first time their parents are,

they're leaving their parents home and having someone and being asked to take care of their chronic conditions themselves is in a college setting. So now care becomes an incredibly important lever in the recruiting process for these students. As parents care about how their kids are being cared for. So universities are seeing this as another tool from a recruiting standpoint as well in terms of bringing that out. So every one of these segments has had a different motivation motivator. And so as a result, the KPI is that frame out what success looks like for them, to the second part of your question, are also fairly tailored for every one of these. We've been very careful. As many segments as we've entered, we've been careful to not boil the

ocean because less is more. We don't want to be all things to all people. and we don't want to be everywhere at the same time. But the fact that we've gone into a bunch of these segments and we're gaining traction continues to prove out our TAM, which in our minds really has no ceiling. And then as we look at the evolution of what we're looking to do over the course of this year, this is a physical health utility right now.

Our plan is before the end of this year to bring mental health into the care station, which now allows for one of its kind, freestanding, outpatient, whole person care utility in the market. And once that the biggest barrier to mental health has been the stigma associated with it, it continues to be a barrier. Once the glass fogs in the care station on the windows and the door,

you could be in there for a beasting or for a mental health consult, no one knows any differently. Completely destigmatizes the care, right? So mental health and with a continued buildout of the underpinning that is very heavily AI, that will power both of these. That really is what the next X amount of time looks like. I fully anticipate at some point. We will go aggressively into retail healthcare

and build out a franchise model for the care station. The only way to solve our access problems as a country are to completely democratize access. The only way to democratize anything as a country is to basically lean heavily on the entrepreneurial spirit of your average American who wants to be able to build their own business and generate wealth for their families themselves. That's been the success of the franchise model across the country. And being able to bring healthcare solidly into that arena and deploying the care station

in a franchise model would be, I believe, a game changer for us as a country. That truly then becomes, as we think public health, the next pandemic is not an if, it's a when. We need care stations everywhere. And then the last thing I would say is, I would say in the next maybe no more than 24 months, we will take this global. Problems we're solving on American problems alone. The franchise aspect is super, super intriguing. Maybe we'll have you on for a round two once you roll that out. I'm very curious because maybe it's just my entrepreneurial instincts. That sounds very, very interesting. I want to leave a few minutes for the rapid fire portion of this interview, but let's get to kind of investor dynamics, right? You touched on a couple of the

things that were important for you taking on the CEO role at the board level. But any business like yours, it's going to require a fair amount of capital, right, even though it sounds like you're running pretty profitably. What do you know now about those investor dynamics that you wish to do maybe 10 years, 15 years ago? I have an inherent trait, Scott. Some people might call it a flaw. I can't quite tell if it's a flaw or a strength yet. I am personally a minimalist. So I have a total of 87 personal things. That's it. And I have zero debt.

I've never been big on raising a lot of money. For me, it has been about how do you raise, I think raising a lot of money, and this is where I can't tell if it's a flaw or strength, because raising a lot of money gives you a lot of mental breathing room to just execute unencumbered. But for me, what it does is,

I believe it creates bad behaviors. It is very easy to spend money that is somebody else's money. I'd much rather create a culture where every person is looking to find the most innovative solutions that are more wedge solutions that are not expensive but are also hyper impactful. And when I have pissed off people telling me, why aren't we going and raising more money, I tell them, listen, guys, you need a stone to sharpen a knife. If I give you a sponge, we're not going to be a sharp knife.

So been very deliberate about how we raise. my perspective on know what ifs has also been very clear. We decided Q4 of last year to go down the SPAC path. Q1 of this year, we pulled back on it. One, our AI ambitions are too large, and the SPAC was just not going to, the public markets would not give us credit for those ambitions earlier in the game. So wanted to take our time and stay private.

But also, that was another place where the SPAC would have given us significant capitalization. I said, listen, I'm going to go back to private, raise some, get to profitability, and then just keep building from there. And again, can't tell strength or weakness, but I'm just going to call it a strength for now. I think businesses that don't have clear line of sight to profitability are experiments. Last I checked, your goal of being a business is to become profitable. So that's singularly where we're focused. And you can't do that by just raising a lot of money and hammering yourself.

The cap table is being hygienic is very important to me. So we have 100% common stock on our cap table today for that reason. We don't have a lot of prefs in it. Don't have any prefs in it on the upside, which allows us to be a very investable company, very investor-friendly company, both for our existing investors and anyone else coming in because they know that no one else coming in after them

is now going to supersede them. So we've been very deliberate about these things. Not a very popular way to think about raising money, but it just sits better with me. I would tend to say it's a strength, right? And we all, you know, I've heard these stories where the company that is constrained, you know, to a certain degree, regardless of what that constraint is, oftentimes will move faster or innovate differently because of that constraint, right?

So I'm right there with you. I mean, there's definitely, there's definitely scenarios where you can use capital as a, as sort of a weapon, if you were, another tool, certainly, right? But that doesn't oftentimes may not be the only answer. I'll put it that way. But I want to get to the rapid fire portion in this interview. But again, for everyone listening,

onmed.com is the website. We'll link to it in the full write-up. OnMed, just as it sounds, on-m-med.com. Very, very interesting technology. It was really, really fun to kind of, learn a little bit more about the product and the company

kind of in advance of this conversation. But a couple quick rapid fire questions, Carthic. You mentioned a couple of things that you're excited about. Is there one particular thing, one particular milestone over the next year that, you know, really gets you puffed up.

Profitability? Okay. I like it. Second question. One lesson, every med tech or health care entrepreneur should really understand. The one thing they really need to get right. Obsess about the journey. Don't get hung up on an exit. Build the best damn company. Investors will come. I like it. All right. Is there one piece of advice that, you know, if you could go back, you know, 10, 15, maybe even 20 years earlier on in your career, would you whisper anything to the younger version of Carthick? I would say don't sweat the small stuff. Don't sweat the small stuff. Good way to wrap this up. Carthaghan, I can't thank you enough for spending an hour riffing on a lot of fun topics. It was enjoyable to get your take on some of these

areas that are crucial, right, for any startup regardless of size to get right. So appreciate you coming on the program. Thank you. I'll have you hold on the line. But for everyone listening, you made it this far. Appreciate your attention. As always, until the next episode of MedSatter goes live, everyone, take care. Hey, it's Scott again. One quick thing before you go. You see, I love bringing you insightful conversations with the best founders and CEOs of medical device and health technology startups. But here's the thing. I'd be super grateful if you could help me reach even more ambitious doers who share our passion. So if you found value in this podcast, if you found yourself nodding your head while listening, or if you simply enjoy what we're doing with Medsider, please take a moment to leave us a review. It's super easy. Just open your Apple Podcast app or the podcast app of your choice, search for our show, and scroll down to the ratings and review section. Leave your honest thoughts and hit that. five-star rating if you think we're worthy. Your feedback is incredibly important and so the best way to ensure we keep bringing you awesome discussions with leading founders and CEOs. So take a moment to be a good friend and leave that review today. As always, thanks for being a part of our journey

and for helping Mediter continue to grow and evolve. Your support is greatly appreciated. All right, enough talk about reviews. Stay tuned for another informative episode coming at you soon.