Transcriptly

How First-Time Founders Can Avoid Mistakes | Pelu Tran, Ferrum Health

EO13:13Added Aug 31, 2026

What Are the Common Mistakes Early-Stage Founders Make? Today's story highlights the lessons learned by Pelu Tran, a serial entrepreneur who has successfully built two startups in the healthcare sector, abou

Watch on YouTube →
Contributed by 刘嘉琪

Transcript

Transcript format

  1. Intro

  2. 00:00Idealist techie, you know, Stanford grad student in the garage saying,
  3. 00:04we're going to make outcomes better.
  4. 00:06Those companies all fail.
  5. 00:07Most early stage founders go to partners and say, hey, what is it that you need?
  6. 00:11Tell me and I'll just deliver it for you.
  7. 00:13If you're looking to them just to give you the answers.
  8. 00:16They don't know what's possible technologically.
  9. 00:18Oftentimes, they're not sure how the market trends are moving.
  10. 00:21They're not going to be able to tell you what the answer is.
  11. 00:23What they're really, really good at is telling you what the problems are.
  12. 00:27My name is Pelu Tran.
  13. 00:28I'm the CEO and co-founder of Ferrum Health.
  14. 00:31Ferrum health is a company that is trying to make clinical AI tools accessible
  15. 00:36to the doctors and patients that need it.
  16. 00:38We just closed a $16 million series A round.
  17. 00:41We've raised a total of $31 million.
  18. 00:44Our success is going to occur by enabling Big tech, big healthcare,
  19. 00:48governments, AI developers,
  20. 00:50by enabling everyone in the market to be able to collaborate and deploy AI
  21. 00:55the way it needs to be deployed.

  22. Quitting Stanford Med Months Before Graduation

  23. 01:00I was months away from graduating Stanford Medical School when I actually
  24. 01:04decided to go on leave to start my first company as a medical student.
  25. 01:07Kudos goes to Stanford Med for allowing us to be extremely flexible with our time.
  26. 01:12So I was one of those students who kind of had my hand in all sorts of different pies
  27. 01:16where I was doing like device work.
  28. 01:18I was working on side projects with friends from the business school
  29. 01:22and the medical school, and Augmedix was really at the beginning,
  30. 01:25just one of those side projects.
  31. 01:26As a medical student, I was working in the county hospital here in the Bay area.
  32. 01:30That was a nightmare.
  33. 01:31I was there while they were transitioning from paper records to electronic records,
  34. 01:37where doctors were losing track of patients.
  35. 01:39No one could figure out where medications were.
  36. 01:40People were burning out and spending three four times as much of their day
  37. 01:45on documentation as they were before.
  38. 01:47And actually back in the day, this was when Google Glass
  39. 01:49was still emerging onto the scene.
  40. 01:51Everyone thought that it was going to be the advent of the wearable era,
  41. 01:55and that emerging technology intersecting with the real pain points
  42. 02:00that I was seeing in my day to day life as a medical student.
  43. 02:03We founded Augmedix because we wanted to.
  44. 02:07Doctors spend their day taking care of patients
  45. 02:09rather than documenting patient records.
  46. 02:11Augmedix and Google Glass allow a scribe located off site to securely see and hear
  47. 02:16what the doctor sees and hears during an exam, in a real time video.
  48. 02:20We showed pretty early on that writing the notes for the doctors actually allows
  49. 02:24them to deliver better care as well. 2 or 3 years into my first company,
  50. 02:27I was still considering going back and still thinking about hey, I what point
  51. 02:32do I maybe leave the company, go back to medical school, become a doctor?
  52. 02:35But once we saw our technology being used to deliver care to thousands of
  53. 02:40additional patients a month, I realized,
  54. 02:42wow, like I have already had more of an impact on healthcare than I would have had
  55. 02:46in my entire career as a doctor.
  56. 02:48And we went to Sand Hill Road and to the venture capital firms there,
  57. 02:51and we were able to raise a round of funding off of that idea,
  58. 02:54and we spent a few years trying to build out the company and prove out the idea,
  59. 02:58and ultimately continued to stay on leave from medical school as the company grew.
  60. 03:05So a few years into the journey, I think the whole world started to realize
  61. 03:10that Google Glass probably wasn't going to be a thing.
  62. 03:13And so we had to figure out, what are we going to do with this company
  63. 03:16and with this mission if Google Glass isn't going to be a thing,
  64. 03:19and if our company's brand has been built off of that so far, because we had that
  65. 03:23really clear mission because we knew, hey, you know, it's not about the Google Glass.
  66. 03:27It's about what we believed the glasses could solve for healthcare,
  67. 03:30that we were able to pivot and pretty rapidly launch tablet and phone
  68. 03:34based versions of our software that instead of sitting in the doctor's face,
  69. 03:37they would bring around either cart around as a tablet
  70. 03:40or bring it around in their pocket.
  71. 03:41That still did the same thing.
  72. 03:42I think what that taught me is that if you go into a new technology looking
  73. 03:48for a problem, you're probably going to get pretty far, but ultimately fail.
  74. 03:52And I think the difference between augmedix, which we were
  75. 03:56able to continue to grow over time, and a lot of these companies,
  76. 03:59is that we started off as a technology looking for a problem,
  77. 04:03but we just happened to find a really, really big and important problem.
  78. 04:08And so that allowed us to stay alive.
  79. 04:10Moving forward from that, I have become really, really careful
  80. 04:14around new technology trends.
  81. 04:16Even I the new wave of AI, telemedicine through Covid,
  82. 04:21all of those boom and bust cycles, they all occur around emerging technologies.
  83. 04:27They never occur around endemic pain points.
  84. 04:29And so j'en ai today. Yes it's promising.
  85. 04:32Yes, it's going to change the world.
  86. 04:34Is it going to change the world to the scale that everyone is
  87. 04:37saying it will at the timeline that everyone is saying it will like?
  88. 04:39Guaranteed? Not.
  89. 04:40And it's because we always tend to overestimate these technologies
  90. 04:44in the near term.
  91. 04:45Over the long term, they will have an impact, but that that long term
  92. 04:49is longer time frame than any one startup is able to weather.

  93. Staying the Course When Everyone Says You're Wrong

  94. 04:59During that journey,
  95. 05:00I actually had an uncle pass away from a late stage lung cancer that was
  96. 05:04missed by his doctors and it was a really
  97. 05:06frustrating experience for myself and my family because I already was a successful
  98. 05:10entrepreneur in the digital health space.
  99. 05:12When we were providing care for him and talking to his doctors, he was
  100. 05:16receiving the best care in the world.
  101. 05:17He was going regularly for his screenings. He did everything right.
  102. 05:20But because his doctors weren't using the most modern of tools,
  103. 05:24a lot of these AI diagnostic tools around lung cancer that have been launched
  104. 05:28over the past decade, he wasn't able to actually have his cancer caught in time.
  105. 05:32In fact, it was missed for almost five years.
  106. 05:34He would have benefited so much from technology, from AI tools.
  107. 05:37His doctors wanted to use those tools, but hospitals not being able to actually
  108. 05:42adopt AI themselves directly, like at some point someone was going to solve it.
  109. 05:46The question was how long will it take to solve?
  110. 05:48What we realized was, if we don't start this company, it is extremely unlikely
  111. 05:52that someone else will and succeed.
  112. 05:54Ferrum health is our attempt at trying to solve this disconnect
  113. 05:59between the technology that's out there,
  114. 06:00the need for a platform that allows for the consolidation of AI vendors into
  115. 06:04a single point Back when we first started the company, I was really skeptical about
  116. 06:10how good these AI tools actually were.
  117. 06:13Some patients and some hospitals that we worked with in Asia that we
  118. 06:17launched our pilot product initially,
  119. 06:19and that was an open source lung nodule tool, something that was made
  120. 06:23available online for public use.
  121. 06:25And we ran it for three days across their scans, and we basically looked to see
  122. 06:31how many patients did this model find that the doctors didn't find.
  123. 06:35And three days later we're like, oh, wow.
  124. 06:38Like, there are almost 50 patients here who have very significant findings.
  125. 06:43It makes the mission of the company just so urgent.
  126. 06:47We happen to have a tailwind of AI hype that maybe it lasts one more year,
  127. 06:52maybe it lasts three more years.
  128. 06:53But like hype cycles come and go.
  129. 06:55And so there's going to be a time when that hype no longer is there.
  130. 06:58But for us, like we solve a real problem that endure over time,
  131. 07:01at some point you have to be solving a really important problem,
  132. 07:04or you will never be able to claw your way out of that experimentation.
  133. 07:09Early stage.
  134. 07:10Most early stage founders, first time founders that I meet,
  135. 07:14are overly focused on building a really good technology product,
  136. 07:19and not enough focus on identifying the exact pain point
  137. 07:22and problem they're solving.
  138. 07:23Figuring out what matters.
  139. 07:24What are the risks that I need to de-risk and proving that out even manually, right?
  140. 07:28Like just by doing it with an Excel spreadsheet
  141. 07:31or with a human being in the background,
  142. 07:32rather than having to launch the whole product and spending all that money
  143. 07:35before you've tested out those initial assumptions.
  144. 07:41Covid was brutal, and this is not a super exciting kind of thing to bring up.
  145. 07:48But Covid was absolutely brutal.
  146. 07:50It was especially brutal because the general perspective was,
  147. 07:54wow, if you're a healthcare company, you should be doing great.
  148. 07:57But the actual reality was like most healthcare companies were dying because no
  149. 08:01one was able to sell unless you were very specifically solving a Covid problem.
  150. 08:05Really, honestly.
  151. 08:06Like we don't have that much to do with global pandemics.
  152. 08:09So we're solving an AI deployment issue for health systems.
  153. 08:12And that just was not a priority. So keeping the team motivated,
  154. 08:16keeping our investors and stakeholders and customers aligned and engaged
  155. 08:20and excited about this problem when nobody cared about it for years
  156. 08:25and years and years was really difficult.
  157. 08:28More patients died due to delay in care than died from Covid.
  158. 08:32We're gonna keep focusing on what we're gonna focus on,
  159. 08:34and we're going to try to build the best business we can around this and survive
  160. 08:38until everyone else kind of gets there.
  161. 08:40I think that easily could have led to the company collapse, but I think what that
  162. 08:44has allowed us to do now that AI is hot,
  163. 08:48now that hospitals are looking at platforms
  164. 08:50now that can all of our original theses,
  165. 08:52when we founded the company have come to bear, and we've stayed focused
  166. 08:55on that problem for the past five years,
  167. 08:57is that we are just, again, incredibly well positioned, and we've got
  168. 09:00such a head start on the broader market.
  169. 09:02In order to actually succeed as a founder, you've got to be really comfortable
  170. 09:07with everyone thinking you're wrong for a really, really long time.
  171. 09:09I still have not seen one example of a massive, iconic company where everyone
  172. 09:15didn't think that they were completely out of their mind for the first few years.
  173. 09:18A human being, you usually look for societal approval as founders like,
  174. 09:24you kind of have to be comfortable not just not having that,
  175. 09:29but being able to convince people who otherwise didn't see it
  176. 09:34the same way you did that you were right.
  177. 09:36And you do have to just be used to everyone, either not knowing
  178. 09:39what you're talking about or thinking you're wrong and just comfortable with
  179. 09:42just over and over and over,
  180. 09:43convincing them of why what you're doing is the right approach
  181. 09:46and why it's important.

  182. Overcoming the Downsides of Starting Young

  183. 09:54A lot of my classmates are now, you know, super high powered, specialized doctors
  184. 09:58that are making a ton of money.
  185. 10:00And so it's easy to look at, hey, like, if I just stayed as a doctor,
  186. 10:04I would be some, you know, badass surgeon doing XYZ thing.
  187. 10:08And especially as my friends all have now, saving a ton of lives day to day.
  188. 10:12Like it's an incredibly rewarding profession that I never had the chance
  189. 10:16to actually go into.
  190. 10:16But that's probably one of the sacrifices and trade offs that I had to make.
  191. 10:21And I just have to look the hundreds and thousands of patients that are technology
  192. 10:25saving and say like, listen, like, fine,
  193. 10:27like I'm not going to do it directly, but we're still going to be able
  194. 10:29to deliver a lot of impact in society, and that's enough for us.
  195. 10:33You kind of have to start companies at a young age because your risk
  196. 10:36appetite goes down as you get older.
  197. 10:38The downside of starting a company when you're young
  198. 10:40is the lack of industry knowledge, the lack of industry connections.
  199. 10:44I think it is much easier to solve those problems just by being diligent,
  200. 10:49and by networking and connecting with people and being open minded.
  201. 10:52You can solve those problems.
  202. 10:53As a young person for first time founders, it is really, really easy to just go
  203. 10:58to hospitals, go to partners and say, hey, like, what is it that you need?
  204. 11:01Like, tell me and I'll just deliver it for you.
  205. 11:03But the real challenge is like, these are problems that health systems
  206. 11:06oftentimes don't know how to solve.
  207. 11:07And so if you're looking to them just to give you the answers.
  208. 11:11They don't know what's possible technologically.
  209. 11:13Oftentimes, they're not sure how the market trends are moving.
  210. 11:16And so they're not going to be able to tell you what the answer is.
  211. 11:19What they're really, really good at is telling you what the problems are.
  212. 11:22And so when we go in and we work with hospitals, we always make sure to
  213. 11:26align around, hey, what are the problems they're trying to solve?
  214. 11:29And it's different depending on the hospital.
  215. 11:30Some hospitals really care about delivering the best care possible
  216. 11:33to the patients, and they want to use these AI tools for that.
  217. 11:36Many others care a lot about productivity by being really clear up front about,
  218. 11:41hey, we solve the security problem, we solve the patient safety problem.
  219. 11:45And if those are problems that you have, let us help you.
  220. 11:47And if they aren't great, you are not the right partner for us.
  221. 11:51We're going to go focus our time elsewhere.
  222. 11:53And that's tough for startups to do because, you know,
  223. 11:55if you're looking at revenue and you otherwise don't have it, that can
  224. 11:58be a really difficult decision to make.
  225. 12:00But as a result, you know, every one of our customers really
  226. 12:03love the fact that we solve a problem that they really care about.
  227. 12:06So I think that's been pivotal to us being able to have
  228. 12:09this trusted advisor relationship with all of our hospital executives,
  229. 12:13and Ferrum is not going to be able to be the one platform that everyone, everywhere
  230. 12:17in the world uses for everything.
  231. 12:19Our success is going to occur by enabling Big tech, big healthcare,
  232. 12:23governments, AI developers,
  233. 12:25by enabling everyone in the market to be able to collaborate and deploy AI
  234. 12:30the way it needs to be deployed.
  235. 12:31And so I don't think of Ferrum as this kind of search bar
  236. 12:34for the internet or as Uber for taxis.
  237. 12:38I don't think we're going to be this dominant kind of front force.
  238. 12:41I think that we are building the pipelines, we're building the tooling,
  239. 12:44the picks and shovels that ideally everyone everywhere is using.
  240. 12:47And if you can make AI truly fungible,
  241. 12:52truly liquid, truly zero cost to adopt, then you end up with
  242. 12:57that future state that I talked about, which is a fundamentally
  243. 13:01transformed healthcare system.