Do You Really Need an MBA to Work in Startups? A Pediatrician’s Path to VC + Founding Grapevyne with Zhen Chan

What does it actually take for a physician to break into startups or venture capital—and do you need an MBA to do it?

In this episode of Startup Physicians, Dr. Alison Curfman talks with Dr. Zhen Chan, a practicing pediatrician and founder of Grapevyne. Zhen shares how he moved from a traditional training path to venture work, what “due diligence” looks like in the real world, and why clinical insight is often the missing piece in healthcare products.

They also discuss why physicians often overvalue credentials, how networking creates opportunities faster than another degree, and how Zhen pivoted Grapevyne from a job marketplace into a community built to help clinicians expand their skills and impact in 2025 and beyond.

Takeaways

• Zhen Chan transitioned from clinical medicine to startups.
• Networking is crucial for career development in healthcare.
• Experience can be more valuable than formal education.
• Venture fellowships provide exposure to the startup ecosystem.
• Clinical perspectives are essential in evaluating healthcare startups.
• Grapevyne aims to empower physicians and medical professionals.
• The importance of adaptability and pivoting in entrepreneurship.
• Understanding regulatory pathways is vital for healthcare innovation.
• Building a community can enhance professional growth.
• Physicians have unique insights that can drive startup success.

Connect with Zhen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zhenmd)
Learn more about Grapevyne: https://grapevyne.health)

https://instagram.com/zhen_md

https://www.tiktok.com/@zhenmd

Chapters

00:00 – Intro + Zhen’s background
01:30 – MBA vs real-world experience
03:10 – Why he pivoted from fellowship plans
05:55 – Networking as the unlock
12:05 – Venture fellowships + due diligence explained
16:10 – Unpaid roles, equity, and value exchange
21:05 – What he learned: how investors think
24:50 – The unique value of physician perspective
28:15 – What Grapevyne is building now
30:45 – Pivot story + closing

Transcript

Alison Curfman (00:01.134)
Hi everyone, welcome back to Startup Physicians. This is your host, Dr. Alison Curfman, and I'm here with Dr. Zhen Chan, a practicing pediatrician and founder of a company called Grapevyne. Thanks for joining me, Zhen.

Zhen Chan (00:16.664)
Thanks so much, Alison. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited for us to get to chat.

Alison Curfman (00:21.506)
Yes. So when we first connected, I got to hear a little bit about your journey of how you went from working in your training in more clinically focused settings to contributing to startups and then founding your own organization. I'd love if you could take us back and tell me a little bit about your background and how you first got involved in startups.

Zhen Chan (00:44.718)
Sure, of course. So I never thought I was going to be in an entrepreneurial setting whatsoever. My dad was a small business owner selling furniture back in Miami. But other than that, I really had no exposure to entrepreneurship. I was gonna be just, know, tunnel through into being a doctor, you know, from pre-med, med school all the way through. In med school, I did take a year off for an MBA in health management and policy. And at the time it was because...

I remember going through rotations as a third year and I had attendings and different like chairs of departments, et cetera, going to get their degrees at like an MBA or some other certification program. And when I asked why it seemed like in order to move up the sort of ladder of leadership in healthcare, they wanted to have this extra expertise. And I was always very extra extracurricularly involved and thought, okay, this was going to be, if I'm a student now, let me do this because it can keep these windows open. So I did that.

I got a Lean Six Sigma certification in quality improvement. My professor was actually very heavy into healthcare quality improvement. And then, you know, just did that opportunity as a way to keep a window open, got into residency, did that in pediatrics. And the goal was to go into hematology oncology fellowship. But a couple things, I think of like the pushes and pulls, the sort of pushes away from following fellowship route.

was I realized I don't like research. I'm not a research heavy person. And I am very kind of just like outcomes oriented and team oriented. And when I started using a lot of the skills I developed from the MBA year, specifically that process improvement course to do a lot of QI projects for my residency, I was a little disillusioned by the fact that a lot of people were more focused on the publication.

and that sort of academic side of things, as opposed to that video course I wanted to put together and like the quality of that, or how am I going to actually, you know, set up a meeting for all the attendings in the clinic to come together to focus on this childhood obesity project that I'm gonna, I'm trying to, you know, put together. And that, that was a lot of the push. The polls was when I started networking and connecting with people, the beginning of my third year, end of my second year, third,

Zhen Chan (03:08.494)
beginning of third year of residency, I started learning that like everybody else working in healthcare was doing things, they were doing things that were trying to make that scalable impact, that broader impact. Sometimes they weren't themselves looking to scale their impact or anything like that, but you know, I met consultants, I met people in VC, I met people in startups, people working in the CDC, WHO on the public side, and everybody's product they were coming out with.

had the ability or the potential to make huge impacts and they were not focused on how am going to get this published. And so that was sort of the pull to want to explore a little bit more. And as much as hemong patients and that sort of care journey is still to this day, relationships and the path that I'm most passionate about from a clinical standpoint, I feel like I made the right choice in, you know, trying something else out.

coming into the startup world a little bit after residency. And the first opportunity I had was overlapping with my last block of residency, which I remember was a PICU block. I found what's called like a venture fellowship. So I found like a first time fund that was raising a first fund and it was focused on pediatrics. So that was awesome. And they were bringing in different people from different clinical backgrounds and different clean ops backgrounds and things like that. And

They brought me on. So I stayed on as a, I got on as a venture fellow, did a lot of due diligence work, a lot of market landscaping, and then stayed on as a senior associate to then bring on more venture fellows afterwards. And that exposed me to the early stage founders and everybody that was working in the startup side on the builder side. And I decided to do it on my own too.

Alison Curfman (04:52.963)
Yeah.

That's very cool. So I'm going to actually backtrack. This is such a cool story. And there's a lot of things in here that I think people will find interesting. So first off, I wanted to address some of your comments about the MBA. I also know of several programs throughout, you know, either within med school or some form of the training program that you can fold in other studies and kind of build it into the years of your.

I would consider more of your investment years. like whether you're investing in, you know, your years of four years of medical school, and some people extend that to be like an MD, MBA or MV PhD or something like that. And then also your training years. I think that it can make a lot of sense to pursue other training to really expose yourself to more opportunities and career paths.

Zhen Chan (05:26.467)
Mm-hmm.

Alison Curfman (05:53.294)
I personally did my MBA during fellowship. But what I hear a lot of people in this audience saying is that they're maybe out of their training by a long time and they're interested in pursuing other work and they've developed like this whole career of expertise. And a lot of people feel like, maybe the thing I have to do before I can even get started is go pay six figures and spend a year or two getting an MBA.

once I'm like now already established in my career. What's your reaction to that?

Zhen Chan (06:30.062)
I think we are so biased as a profession towards needing like something on paper, like a degree. Yep.

Alison Curfman (06:36.576)
I need a certification. need someone to tell me I'm qualified to do this because I need proof that I'm qualified to do this, yeah.

Zhen Chan (06:44.618)
Exactly. And philosophically, I disagree with that. I think like you can get exposure by just finding an opportunity. You may need to work for free, right? Like early stage career and things like that. You're making a fresh transition. You kind of have to put yourself in the mindset of I'm going back to becoming an intern and like, I'm just going to like absorb and be a sponge and do all that. And I tell people that if you're able to find an opportunity like that,

it probably is more valuable than any MBA or any certification program can give you, right? Now, that's my philosophical sort of understanding of it or like, yeah, what I believe. Now, there may be people that are like, we only hire five years out of MBAs and things like that. That's the tough part.

Alison Curfman (07:15.981)
Yeah.

Alison Curfman (07:21.742)
I

Alison Curfman (07:31.854)
haven't seen that so much. think when I got my MBA, was working within a healthcare system and I felt like I would never be taken seriously as a leader on the business side if I didn't have a degree because there's so many healthcare administrators that have just a business degree. But then I feel like once you break out into the startup and venture world, I agree with you that I learned way more from working.

Zhen Chan (07:37.07)
Hmm.

Zhen Chan (07:44.429)
Yeah.

Zhen Chan (07:48.93)
Yeah. Yeah.

Alison Curfman (07:58.668)
at a firm for a year and being exposed to all of the ways they do things and the people and what we were trying to achieve than I ever learned within an MBA. So, I mean, I think it can have value, but I also don't know that anybody is looking at those three letters after your name too carefully. They care more about your experience and what you're trying to solve for.

Zhen Chan (08:10.434)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Zhen Chan (08:22.306)
I agree. And I think you're right. Like it's the kind of more corporate settings, the administrative settings that may care about it more than the early stage startup settings or some of these more, I would say like nimble forward thinking companies, right? And I do think, and you'll probably hear this from a lot of people who do their MBA is like the most valuable component to it was the networking and the connections you make because that is in and of itself is going to maybe

Alison Curfman (08:45.134)
Correct.

Zhen Chan (08:50.402)
give you the opportunities. People are gonna think of you more because you went out together to a happy hour or to a networking event. And I remember in my MBA, we were doing networking events like twice a week, either hosted by my institution or one that was hosted externally. And just every opportunity to network was one that the students were capitalizing on. And I really wish that the med schools did that more too.

Alison Curfman (09:14.03)
Yeah, actually we probably have a lot of a lot to learn from the business community in that standpoint, but also people in business school probably aren't working 30 hour shifts and nights, and holidays. So it makes it a little harder. Um, but I think you said something really important, which is, so I think there's two main things that people can be doing at any point in their career with or without investing six figures in a degree and all that time.

Zhen Chan (09:25.302)
Super fair. Super, super fair.

Zhen Chan (09:39.618)
Mm-hmm.

Alison Curfman (09:40.422)
is one, just investing in your continued growth, whether that's even things like listening to podcasts or taking courses or going to conferences. And then two is developing your network. So an MBA may have given an opportunity to do that, but I think there's so many ways that people can continue to or develop a network in an area that even if you don't know anyone right now, it's like I teach people how to actually identify

Zhen Chan (10:00.847)
Mm-hmm.

Alison Curfman (10:10.254)
problems they're interested in solving and do searches for companies and people that are working on those problems and actually just reaching out to them. Like, it's not something that we do naturally as doctors, but it's very effective.

Zhen Chan (10:21.005)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, what's I, I want to sort of double click on the point about like listening to podcasts. When I was starting this journey of exploration, the first thing I did was actually listen to a podcast just like very similar to this one, but it was about all different types of non clinical work. was the non clinical careers podcast by John Dr. John Jerica. And that was like,

my entrance into starting to reach out to people. I literally found some of the guest speakers on that podcast and just reached out to them in order to learn what everybody was doing in different sectors of healthcare. And I hope listeners of this podcast, of your podcast, will be open to doing the same. It's like hearing these journeys and then trying to reach out to these people and asking questions.

Alison Curfman (11:09.694)
been a reaching out sort of person because I'm just, I think that just connecting with people just comes very, very naturally to me. But what's become clear to me is that what makes people stand out is when they reach out, not because you're like the world's best pediatrician or like you're the most published or you've written stuff for JAMA. It's because you expressed sincere interest, you reached out, you made a connection. And if you

Zhen Chan (11:12.025)
Mm-hmm.

Zhen Chan (11:23.535)
Hmm.

Alison Curfman (11:36.824)
have that as a consistent habit, what you'll end up with is a lot of contacts and a lot of people doing different things. I think LinkedIn is an excellent way to connect with people. based on your advice, the great news is that every single person listening to this is already on the right track. They're listening to a podcast right now. So I'd love to hear more. This venture fellowship sounds really cool and sounds like something that's

Zhen Chan (11:56.195)
Yep, exactly. Exactly.

Alison Curfman (12:05.358)
pretty unique. think that one of the cool things about working for a firm instead of just a direct company is the breadth of exposure that you get because you get exposure to all of the inner workings of a firm level and insight into and visibility into all the portfolio companies and how you assess if a company is doing well and how do you do discovery and diligence and that sort of thing. So when you were describing it,

I'm sure that some people that haven't had this sort of experience are probably like, I don't even know what that means. What does it mean to do diligence? can you describe a little bit more about, first off, was this a paid role? And second off, what the responsibilities actually were?

Zhen Chan (12:39.714)
What that means, yeah. Yeah.

Zhen Chan (12:50.444)
Yeah. So it was not a paid role. And I would say the vast majority of fellowships I do know it's either a not paid role or some kind of very small stipend. The typical expectations from both my experience and those that I've met doing other venture fellowships, the hourly expectation is somewhere around like five to 15, averaging 10 hours a week of work. And the type of work you're doing

So diligence, what does that mean? Diligence is essentially the very thorough evaluation of an opportunity that you may or may not want to invest in. So you're having that company pitched to you, then you're looking at the market yourself and analyzing what that market landscape looks like. You wanna dig into the financials and see if the financial model they present makes sense. And then you may not be, I definitely wasn't, the financial analyst or expert. So you have someone on the team that like,

you get together and one person talks about the financials, one person talks about the clinical aspect, one person talks about, know, like, how does this compare to everybody else doing the same exact thing in the entire landscape? And you're all doing this and presenting it to, sometimes if it's a smaller team, you may be presenting directly to the partner of the firm that started it or the managing partner. Oftentimes managing partner means like the person that you're gonna directly report to because they're managing the fund as opposed to some

people called the limited partners, which they're just like investors in this fund and they may not be in the day to day in the weeds. So you may be presenting directly to them when it's a smaller team or if it's a bigger kind of organization working on, you know, their fifth fund or their sixth fund or whatever it is, you may be presenting to a director position or a principal position that is overseeing the sector that you're in, right? Like, so for me, it was a healthcare sector. Healthcare venture funds may then divide it into

digital health, therapeutics, medical devices. And so everybody has a different structure. But that was what my sort of five to 10 hours a week when I was still on my picky rotation looked like. was organizing who do we need to meet when the partner's going out to a conference? Who are the companies that are submitting into like our Google form or our air table form, which is a different like version of a Google form.

Zhen Chan (15:11.449)
who is submitting information and wanting to pitch and just from their material, who should we actually take a call with? Because there's just hundreds and hundreds of these companies. You can't really take a call with all of them. It's very, very difficult, especially when you have a smaller team. So that was the work that I was doing the majority of. And my final point is, if you are looking for a venture fellow type of opportunity, I would say just kind of Google it. Because there's a lot of these places, they

Their title is just Venture Fellow. Yeah.

Alison Curfman (15:40.686)
Oh, all sorts of people would love to have a free work. I want to point this out because I think physicians are very skittish about like, oh, well, I don't know what value I could generate. So I wouldn't know what to charge and I don't want to get taken advantage of. And I have a job and it takes a ton of my time and the thought of doing something extra for five to 10 hours a week is totally overwhelming. So I just want to point out that

Zhen Chan (15:56.815)
Mm.

Of

Zhen Chan (16:07.459)
Mm-hmm.

Alison Curfman (16:09.068)
What you just described is really common in the business world. So like I think about like our MBA students that do a summer internship and what they're getting out of it is experience, connections. They're getting a lot of exposure. They're getting skills that they can actually then go market in the future. Very soon after their internship, they can.

Zhen Chan (16:29.571)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Alison Curfman (16:32.246)
make it clear like, I worked at this firm and I have this reference from that firm and I did this sort of work, which means I can now I have experience doing it and now I can do it for you. And so that is incredibly valuable and very, very, very common in the business world that people will do like an unpaid internship or something. The reason that can work is because it has to be time bound. You can't have someone that's like, you're going to provide free value for us forever. And I think that

This goes back to what we've talked about before we started recording that physicians need to simultaneously be really confident in the value of their clinical skills and also very humble about the fact that there's a lot they still need to learn in this space and there's new skills they need to develop. So it's actually not that uncommon. One of the things I help physicians do is actually, as they're trying to find placement in their first opportunities, sometimes that will look like,

working with a portfolio company in an equity only arrangement, which I consider funny money. It's not real. You're not actually getting money in your pocket for that. But if we can set up the right arrangements, we can really anchor it as a knowledge exchange that you're gaining a lot of experience exposure. You're getting exposure to their fund and their investors and how they function and maybe introductions to other portfolio companies.

Zhen Chan (17:35.491)
Right.

Alison Curfman (17:57.967)
You're getting someone that can be a reference for you. You're learning how to do business development or work with a product team. And you don't feel like you're completely being exploited because technically you have equity in the company. Now, early stage companies, there's a good chance that some of might not work out. But the other thing that this structure allows is that you can be in more of a supportive position like what you're describing. You can have some equity, funny money.

Zhen Chan (18:12.623)
Mm-hmm.

Alison Curfman (18:28.685)
And if you really are helping them reach their outcomes, they will get to a point where they're going to have capital. They're going to raise money or they're going to get an anchor contract. And so I always build it into any sort of arrangements that I physicians make with these sorts of companies that maybe it's an equity only arrangement to start, then it will be renegot, like a compensation will be renegotiated upon the first capital raise or contract close so that once they actually have working capital,

Zhen Chan (18:47.983)
Mm-hmm.

Alison Curfman (18:56.408)
that our physicians can get paid. I think that people, sometimes people like hesitate to even get involved in this space because they're like, well, I wouldn't, I don't have the slightest idea what to charge. I don't know what I'm worth. I don't know what value I can contribute and I don't want to get taken advantage of.

Zhen Chan (19:11.085)
Yeah. Yeah. The, you're thinking about hourly rates and sort of the financial nature of your contribution, I would say that is more than starting to lean into like consulting type work, or if it's just purely like transactional, right? Like you're a pediatrician. I need you to help us test this product that we're going to try to market to pediatricians at three hours a week. That's a very transactional relationship. These venture fellowships is

Alison Curfman (19:24.013)
Yep.

Zhen Chan (19:39.489)
I'm actually coming in and applying for this job because I don't know anything about your world, but I'm very interested in it. And I want to learn just like an intern is learning through residency to start building those skills and capabilities and that knowledge set.

Alison Curfman (19:54.678)
Yeah, yeah. And I think there's actually opportunity even when firms don't have a formal program in place. I think that's one of the things that I'm working on for the people that I've trained and now creating a community of physicians who have like, I consider them a talent pool, but trying to help broker arrangements between these really qualified doctors and venture firms to

Zhen Chan (20:04.335)
Mm-hmm.

Zhen Chan (20:16.121)
Mm-hmm.

Alison Curfman (20:23.266)
really create really defined objectives on both sides. What is the fund going to get out of this relationship? What is the doctor going to get out of this relationship? How is it going to be structured so that everyone is receiving value and that it's time bound and it's just an opportunity that I can help broker because I have so many connections in the venture space. I just know so many firms that are like, give me some doctors. We really, really need advisors. And so that's one.

Zhen Chan (20:36.857)
Mm-hmm.

Alison Curfman (20:53.622)
service that I'm working on for 2026. But yeah, how do you think the experience turned out for you? What came out of your venture fellowship as far as opportunities and connections and skills?

Zhen Chan (21:06.979)
Yeah, the connections and the networking was probably the most fantastic part. constantly meeting another, like I was meeting maybe two or three early stage founders on a weekly basis. know, attending some of these virtual conferences and just like posting about yourself and learning from other people's posts about themselves and making connections on LinkedIn. That was, that's invaluable. The other piece that it,

provided me was understanding how investors think. So that when I ended up going to the other side and going on the operator side, I understood what people were looking for in a pitch deck. I understood like just like a medical student sending in an application to an admissions council, like the mentality of the admissions person, right? Like, what are we looking for? And so being able to speak that same language was a great, I think, skill that I developed. So those two pieces.

under the networking and then understanding everything from the investor side to say like, know this pitch deck needs to look this way. This is what we should present. You know, that is probably the most valuable piece to it.

Alison Curfman (22:14.25)
Yeah. And then just having that visibility across a full portfolio, can start to have a lot of pattern recognition, right? Because like there may be like 20 companies or 10 companies that they're spinning off or supporting or have invested in, and they're all different products. They may be different markets, different parts of healthcare, different stages. Some of them may be seed or series A or five years in.

Zhen Chan (22:21.582)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Zhen Chan (22:36.772)
Mm-hmm.

Alison Curfman (22:43.242)
And they're all following a pattern. Like you start to see like these are the consistencies across an entire portfolio of what's required in every company. This is what's required in companies at this stage versus this stage. This is what they need to grow into. And it makes you such a great advisor for later. Like it makes it such so that if you're working with an early stage company, you know what a good series A company looks like and what is the difference? What is the Delta?

so that you can advise them on that. And so I think that the more companies and builds and perspectives you can have exposure to, the more value you can contribute to future engagements.

Zhen Chan (23:24.226)
Absolutely. And it was an opportunity to understand things like the regulatory space, right? Like, as we were looking at medical device companies, therapeutics companies, and so these companies would present to you where they are in the regulatory pathways. And so it was an opportunity for me to learn, like, what is clearance? What is approval? I realized that there are different things like FDA cleared and FDA approved is two different, they're two different definitions. You know, things like rare disease pathways for pediatrics or the 510 K clearance, but like all these terms.

are things that us as clinicians just never had before. And being in an opportunity like this, it's not that you can't learn it, it's that like, when you have an opportunity that sort of pushes you and nudges you to learn it, then you have a reason to do it, right? And so like, you have now a reason to Google and to ask JATCBT like, hey, what are these terms? Like a seed stage company, where should they be with their clinical trials? All these things were just new.

bits of knowledge that I gained from that fellowship opportunity.

Alison Curfman (24:24.8)
Yeah, there's no shortage of free knowledge out there. It's just how motivated are you to go find it and learn it and apply it? Do you feel like in that role, because you had just completed an MBA as well, did you feel like you were more operating as like an MBA intern or do you feel like you as a doctor were really bringing some sort of doctor clinical perspective that was valuable?

Zhen Chan (24:31.749)
Mm-hmm.

Zhen Chan (24:43.064)
Zhen Chan (24:50.51)
Yeah, I would say the perspective that was more valuable was the clinical perspective. So understanding when someone was telling you their, you know, million, billion dollar idea, kind of being like, I don't know if that's a even hundred thousand dollar idea, like, because it sounds great, but like, I wouldn't use it. I don't think my patients would use it. And I think the impact is going to be stuck with this is going to get very concrete, but it's like your impact is going to stick with just people who can pay for this out of pocket.

Alison Curfman (25:07.245)
Yeah.

Zhen Chan (25:20.27)
This is not going to have some kind of payment pathway. And so no doctor is going to prescribe this, or this is going to be too hard to use. And you're going to need to go through a huge like obstacle of explaining it to the physicians. And they're just not going to want to use this. Like it's not a hundred X better than the status quo. So the switching cost is too high. But then it was the, I think the MBA did provide me some of those skills to already understand things like the concept of a switching cost, right? Like,

how a product team might work and how like people that are on the, how a product manager manages developers. Those were sort of things that I started to get a little semblance of during the MBA year that were very, very helpful. And so it was a mix, but definitely I think my contribution was more on the clinical side.

Alison Curfman (26:12.718)
And I think that's what this audience needs to hear too, is that like all of the things that they know, a lot of people think that their expertise is like, oh, I am a reproductive endocrinologist and I know a lot about this particular field. Quite honestly, you know a lot about how healthcare works, like living and working in the system and seeing the patient journeys of what people have to do to get the care they need and what the physician or

Zhen Chan (26:15.909)
Mm-hmm.

Zhen Chan (26:30.768)
Mm-hmm.

Alison Curfman (26:41.944)
provider side of things is and what are the challenges and what does a typical clinic look like? What does a typical triage to discharge ER workflow look like? We know these things and we don't even know that they're specialized knowledge because this is just like things that we take for granted that, well, doesn't everyone know that? And the truth is no, everyone doesn't know that. They're building business models, making tons of assumptions. And so when you can bring this actually very broad,

Zhen Chan (27:01.36)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Alison Curfman (27:10.968)
healthcare system and healthcare delivery perspective, it can be very, very valuable.

Zhen Chan (27:16.592)
Mm hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100%. I think there was someone that recently even reached out. I'm trying to think. yeah, like thinking about, you know, how can we better do the intake process for our primary care patients? And they wanted to just have a call because these are it was a just someone with like administrative business background and a product product manager who were coming up with this idea. I think a fantastic idea, but they need someone who's actually worked in that

process flow in order to give them the advice of like, is this something that you would even use? Can this be integrated if you're having 15 minutes per patient, 20 minutes per patient? Like, is this something even, even if you want to use it, is it usable? Right? Like, like you may think it's great, but as a pediatrician, but like if nobody else, the front desk staff can't work with it, like how is this going to actually get integrated? These are all things that I think are very valuable as a clinician to provide to the startup space.

Alison Curfman (27:58.594)
Right, right, right.

Alison Curfman (28:13.196)
This has all been such great practical advice and such a cool story. I'd love if we could spend the last minute or so, if you could share what you're building as a founder now and what your mission is for the organization that you just started.

Zhen Chan (28:27.537)
Sure, sure, sure, sure. So my startup, which I sometimes even hesitate to call a startup, it's more of a community. It's Grapevyne. So Grapevyne spelled with a Y. And what I'm really trying to do is honestly just help physicians and medical students and even APPs too, PAs, NP's, whatever you want to do with your career, like have the confidence to be able to do it. And so it's really a community to provide networking connections and resources.

And the way I've divided up the spaces is like based on, know, it's, there's a space for personal finance. There's a space for narrative medicine, for AI and tech, for policy. Like the idea is we have to be a clinician in 2025, soon to be 2026. I think that we need to have a very much, just a much broader skillset than what practicing medicine entailed or being a healthcare provider entailed 20 years ago, 30 years ago, maybe even 10 years ago.

And that involves something of getting your message across to a broader audience, making your impact something that's a little bit scaled up, whether that is being a social media influencer and tackling misinformation, or it's getting involved in government and legislative advocacy as like a strong voice with an experienced voice, or getting into the tech world and contributing in the ways that you and I are, our clinical expertise.

into these companies so that money isn't just being burnt on products that will never get used. Or it could be just research. Like you stay in academia, you want to get into leadership, you want to become the chair of your department and be a voice for a certain research topic. Like whatever it is, the goal of Grapevyne is to provide that ability for you to find the right people and have easier free access to the resources that can help you with that journey. So that's what I'm trying to build right now.

And I want to say, like, I'm very transparent. Grapevyne originally was a job marketplace product. you know, if you listen to me on other podcasts, like I was advertising or not advertising, but like I was talking about this job board that was about referral based job finding for physicians. And this is kind of where that humility needs to come in and that ability to say like, I didn't do it right. Maybe, right.

Zhen Chan (30:46.636)
We were selling into enterprises, were selling into healthcare, we're B2B sales on this product. And it just was so slow, we were burning capital and it just wasn't working. And then having that humility to say, I think I need a pivot. I think we like, this is not working. We can't just keep, you know, like doing the same exact thing and hoping it will work. We should pivot. And that's what actually led me to going into this community side of things and saying, I actually want to just take a step back and not really build out this quote unquote business at the moment.

I just wanna provide, since I have this network of physicians and medical students, just provide for this community, which is something that was always part of my vision, but I was just doing it sort of, I think, backwards, and now I'm like, let's just focus on community. So I like to just admit that failure, quote unquote failure, if you will.

Alison Curfman (31:29.678)
That's awesome. Yeah, everything that you learn from moves you forward. So, well, thank you so much for joining us. For those of you who are interested in connecting with Zhen, we'll put his LinkedIn in the show notes and a link to Grapevyne Health. But this was very inspiring and informative, and I really appreciate your time. So thank you, Zhen.

Zhen Chan (31:54.062)
Awesome. It was great to see you, Alison. Yeah. Anybody who wants to, please reach out.

Alison Curfman (32:00.654)
We'll see you guys next time.

Zhen Chan (32:02.118)
Bye.