AI, Entrepreneurship & the Physician Advantage with Dr. Daniel Kraft

In this episode of Startup Physicians, Dr. Alison Curfman sits down with renowned physician-scientist, entrepreneur, and futurist Dr. Daniel Kraft to explore what it truly means to build at the intersection of medicine, technology, and innovation.

From launching an online medical bookstore as a resident during the early days of the internet, to co-founding Stanford Biodesign innovations, advising and investing in digital health startups, leading conversations on AI in healthcare, and even serving as a flight surgeon and astronaut finalist—Daniel’s career defies the traditional medical path.

Together, Alison and Daniel discuss how physicians can identify real pain points, why beginner’s mind is such a powerful advantage, how AI will reshape clinical care faster than any previous innovation, and what doctors must do now to remain relevant, ethical, and impactful in the next decade of medicine.

This conversation is a must-listen for physicians curious about entrepreneurship, digital health, AI, venture, or simply expanding their impact beyond the exam room—without leaving medicine behind.

In this episode, we cover:

• How Daniel became an entrepreneurial physician before it was mainstream
• Turning clinical frustration into a million-dollar startup during residency
• The power of identifying real pain points in medicine
• Stanford Biodesign and why structure matters in healthcare innovation
• Why early-career physicians often see opportunities others miss
• The current explosion of AI and digital health tools—and why it’s overwhelming
• How AI will change medicine faster than EMRs or telehealth ever did
• The importance of physician voices in AI ethics and guardrails
• Feature vs company: how founders should think strategically
• Capital strategy advice for non-technical physician founders
• Aerospace medicine, flight surgery, NASA work, and astronaut selection
• Why crossing disciplines creates the most meaningful innovation
• How physicians can expand impact without abandoning clinical work

Chapters:

00:00 – Welcome & Introduction to Dr. Daniel Kraft

01:05 – An Entrepreneurial Mindset Before It Was “Allowed”

02:10 – Building an Online Medical Bookstore as a Resident

04:00 – Lessons from an Early Startup Exit

06:00 – Stanford Biodesign & Finding Clinical Pain Points

07:40 – Creating a Medical Device from Bedside Frustration

09:50 – Digital Health Overload & Why Clinicians Feel Behind

11:35 – Design Thinking in Healthcare Innovation

13:45 – Physician Fears Around AI (and Why They Matter)

15:40 – AI Guardrails, Ethics, and Patient Safety

18:40 – Why Healthcare Can’t Innovate at a 17-Year Pace Anymore

20:00 – Venture Capital, Startups & Feature vs Company

22:00 – Advice for Non-Technical Physician Founders

26:30 – Aerospace Medicine, NASA & Becoming an Astronaut Finalist

29:00 – Final Advice for Physicians Expanding Beyond Clinical Care

Resources Mentioned:

• Daniel Kraft's website: DanielkraftmdDaniel Kraft M.D.
• NextMed Health: NextmedNextMed Health: Re-imagining the Future of Health and Medicine digital health platform
• Continuum Health Ventures: ContinuumhealthContinuum Health Ventures | Healthspan Venture Capital
• Stanford Biodesign Program StanfordPrograms
  
  

Transcript

Alison Curfman (00:01.07)
Hi everyone. Welcome back to the Startup Physicians podcast. This is your host, Dr. Alison Curfman, and I'm joined today by an incredibly impressive physician, Dr. Daniel Kraft. He and I connected at a recent event where he was speaking and I was so impressed with Daniel with your career and all of the different things that you have been contributing to. And I'm very excited that you decided to spend some time with us. So thank you.

Daniel Kraft M.D. (00:30.128)
Great to be with you.

Alison Curfman (00:31.906)
So if you could go ahead and just share with us a little bit about your journey. I think you have so many different things you're involved in, including startups and venture and I don't know, outer space maybe too. But I'd love to hear about your journey.

Daniel Kraft M.D. (00:51.952)
Well, mean, briefly, I think I was an entrepreneurial physician before it was in fashion. I did the traditional sort of medical scientist route. I went to Brown University undergrad, came out to Stanford for medical school, did med peds residency at Mass General, came back for fellowships in hematology, oncology, and bone marrow transplant. I'll skip all that with a side gig in aerospace medicine. But I think where the first entrepreneurship bug caught in was I always liked

you know, an early adopter tried all the gadgets and things along those lines. And I remember I was doing a sub internship at Boston Children's actually, and the internet came online for the first time. It was the early browsers and Mosaic. And I spent most of my rotation in the library browsing the early web. And about a week before that, I'd been to the Stanford Medical Bookstore, they had a dedicated bookstore. And I remember being, oh my God, Harrison's textbook of medicine, everything's overpriced. know, once a year, there'd be a stethoscope sale. And I thought, when I saw the first

web, I saw the very first e-commerce, I thought, boy, every medical student buys the same 10 books, Robbins, Dubin, Stryer, Netter, et cetera. There should be an online medical bookstore. And to make a super long story short, that was my pain point. Books are overpriced. know, once a year there'd be a stethoscope sale. So I taught myself HTML, which was a little course at Stanford Med School, built what was called the online

discount medbooks.com and it was an online medical bookstore and I figured out before there was Shopify or anything like that that you could get a reseller's license and if you bought Harrison's textbook of medicine was normally $100 I could get it drop shipped to you for 80 bucks and so I take 10 % off for you and I keep 10 % and I basically built this from scratch like the emergency medicine I will play the music from ER it was all very hard-coded when you sent me your credit card I got the credit card encrypted and put it into something called cybercash and so basically learned to build a business

that met my pain point of overpriced books and later added on Cal Zero clogs and stethoscopes. And I basically launched it finally when I was an intern at Mass General Hospital. And I started getting all sorts of orders. My mom became customer service. I had to different selections, but I could program it, run it. And I got it to about a million dollar run rate, I think, by my junior year of residency. we're just getting a little crazy. And I still didn't know what I was doing. And you know, the margin wasn't that much. It was like eight, maybe 10 % and 8%. And I remember talking to a

Alison Curfman (02:56.91)
Wow.

Daniel Kraft M.D. (03:07.59)
an accountant going, I'll never make any money on this. So like look at your costs, et cetera. And I thought, oh, I'm just doing this for fun. And to make a long story short, I was making an affiliate model. One of the affiliates said, we don't wanna be your affiliate, we wanna buy you. This is the height of the go-go 90s. So to make a long story short, I was audited in my Beacon Hill apartment by...

they're now gone, Anderson Consulting, one of the big consulting firms, had all my numbers done and got acquired at the height of the bubble. But my lesson for entrepreneurs out there, I was acquired on the premise of this company going public, which they did, but I had this lockup period, which was like for a year, and in that year the bubble burst. But it was a great story, I made a little cash out of it and learned to be entrepreneurial and see that there was even exits and something you could build yourself in your Beacon Hill apartment. But the lesson was, finding a pain point.

an unmet need, in this case, buying textbooks and then spreading that out, you know, including for nursing students and others across the country.

Alison Curfman (04:02.968)
think that's such a cool story and you're not the first person that I've talked to that really, really early on was good at finding problems and being like, should fix that. I'll fix that. And I think some people just have that. I certainly feel like I notice a lot of problems and think like, I'm gonna find a way to solve that. And sometimes it can be very distracting because it's like, man, that.

That's none of my business. It's hard to see things, opportunity all over the place. It's like, well, I could probably create something there. But it's a great attitude to have, to have this curiosity and being able to follow a path and actually just start seeing if you can figure it out. So that's a cool story.

Daniel Kraft M.D. (04:48.806)
And now the opportunity is to figure it out and iterate and build faster. Now you could vibe code an online medical bookstore in half an hour on Replet and probably even launch it. I've been doing some of that myself with this digital.health platform I've been building. But it comes down to, especially when you're a medical student or an intern or resident, you've got this beginner's mind. You see things with fresh eyes, whether you're in an operating room and like, why are you retractors like that? Or why are we still using fax machines? Or you see all sorts of problems. And now the opportunity to be entrepreneurial and to build something, you know,

with AI as a cornerstone or others is really phenomenal. And back in the day when I was a medical student, know, everyone were resident people looked that I had a third eye that I was doing anything entrepreneurial and certainly was not well looked upon at Mass General Hospital by the upper D Ops. So that the times have changed. And then when I came back to Stanford fellowships, I joined as part of the first year of the Stanford Biodesign program, which is now 20 something years old. And it's all themed about finding pain points in its medical students and docs and nurses and engineers. And they

send even the non-medical folks into the clinic or into the home and see the pain point from the perspective of not just of the physician, but of the patient, pharma, payer, all the P's, and give you a bit of a structure to not just find the problem, really test it, iterate, solve for it, and then launch it into something that could be truly impactful. I developed a medical device company out of that one as well.

Alison Curfman (06:08.426)
Yeah, so tell me more about your experience with Stanford Biodesign. It's such an incredible program. I've always heard such wonderful things about it. I've known several people that went through that program. And you said you developed a device company out of that?

Daniel Kraft M.D. (06:22.298)
Yeah, I mean, literally the pain point, I was doing my bone marrow transplant fellowship and we were going to the operating room once or twice a month to harvest bone marrow. We'd have a big trocar, big needle, aspirate, about 10 cc's of marrow about 100 times on each side of the hip. So the rear end of the donor often looks like a Swiss cheese underneath the skin. I thought, this is laborious, takes an hour of general anesthesia, all the other things involved. And I sort of invented this device we called the Marrow Miner. Basically a little road router goes in once and sort of follows the curve of the iliac crest, which is quite curvy. It enables

you to do an entire harvest under local anesthesia and get more stem cells out, less blood. so got that through a little innovation grant and tested in pigs and then started a company and lots of lessons and war stories involved in that. But got it for the FDA clearance, et cetera. But that was, again, a pain point that I was experiencing clinically and going, wow, why are we doing it this way when it might be done in a different way? And the construct of having a community like Biodesign or other entrepreneurs like you and coaches and mentors is that it takes a village.

and often helpful to learn from folks who have to the FDA paths or know what regulatory elements are or how to launch a device or an app. And so now that I think entrepreneurship is more the zeitgeist and they're now MD, MBAs and others in the mix, it's an amazing time to build and catalyze some impact.

Alison Curfman (07:39.35)
And healthcare is unlike any other industry when it comes to like the regulations and the compliance and there's so much that you have to do it completely right. And so I think you're right that when you have the right mentors and the right people around you that know how to navigate some of these really complex pathways, that is probably the only way to be successful. Nobody can do this sort of thing on their own. But I love your point about

how sometimes people that are earlier in their career are more eyes wide open about potentially seeing ways of doing things that are kind of archaic. Because some of us, we kind of accept them because it's just like, it's the way it's always been. And it's hard to see those as, yeah, you're right. Why do we use fax machines? I don't know. I don't know that we're ever going to stop using fax machines.

But it is interesting that there's actually a ton of potential for people who are earlier in their career.

Daniel Kraft M.D. (08:39.355)
Yeah, then my coaching did.

anybody particularly to medical students and residents is heap a little notebook, know, or a virtual notebook of you see something and that really bugs me that we're still doing that or the patient gets discharged and bounced back for some silly reason when they could have been tracked with a connected scale or blood pressure cuff. My current pain point I'm solving for is when this explosion of digital health and AI and it's overwhelming, there's an explosion of wearables. I've got my whoop on and my Apple watch and my aura ring and my ultra human ring. Just take the best sleep score, there you go.

But many clinicians still don't use them or are aware of them in the workflow of their clinical care. So I've been building a platform called digital.health. I got the domain digital.health. That's a website. And you can now search through and find amongst 4,000 5,000 different solutions things that might match you as a consumer, a patient, a clinician, a practice. And sort of a bit of a reboot of that online medical bookstore, but sort of trying to hyper-personalize digital health. And now you can again build those things with five-goating in your sleep.

But the business models are still tough and healthcare is hard, but there's nothing better than improvising not just a widget to make money, but to impact prevention, diagnostics, therapeutic, or public health.

Alison Curfman (09:48.844)
Yeah, because I think that the physician perspective is incredibly valuable, especially in early development and design, because it's not just that we understand the clinical side of things on a biological level, but also on an interpersonal and a systems level. How do our patients move through the system? How does the health care system actually function? And I think this insight is so

valuable and some doctors don't actually know that what they already know is valuable. They could be working with companies and sharing those insights.

Daniel Kraft M.D. (10:27.131)
Yeah, it's sort of that real world and systems approach, because you might have the best device, drug, app, you pick your solution, but you have to put it into context, right? What might work in a VA or a Kaiser that's a payvider is very different than a Sutter or a fee-for-service practice or wherever you might be in the world. One example of that, part of my journey is, and we can talk more about that, I ended up chairing medicine for something called Singularity University and building a whole program looking at the future of

it was called exponential medicine, called Nexpen Health. But in our first couple of years, we take everyone to the Garfield Innovation Center, that's the Kaiser Innovation Hub in the East Bay and the San Francisco Bay Area. And they actually mock up an operating room, clinic, a home environment. They tested the beds with the doors. And when you connect all these different dots and displays and platforms, do they work together? And do the nurses want to use it in the of the design thinking modality that you need to?

fit your solution into a larger practice or workflow or payment models or misaligned incentives. So as an entrepreneur, you can't be thinking just about the tech, but how it fits in to the bigger picture. A lot of that, again, is the whole ecosystem at play.

Alison Curfman (11:36.332)
Yeah, I think people that come from Stanford often are very familiar with design thinking. But when I talk to other physicians, it's not a concept that they're very familiar with. What are your thoughts about how that is important in the development of new solutions?

Daniel Kraft M.D. (11:53.704)
I mean, design, when I think of design, it's often people boil down to UI or UX, know, user interface or, and now, you know, so much of healthcare has a terrible UI, right? The fax machine, the PDF labs, now we're starting to see designers come in, build platforms like Function Health where your patients are going themselves and getting their labs done and looking at them with progressive, beautiful displays with AI interpretation. That's kind of UI built as a wrapper on top of labs and an ordering process, kind of the Uber, I always use Uber as an example. Uber is a...

exponential company that connected doubts between online payments and GPS and cars and traffic and made a good UI, the easy button, right? And a lot of that doesn't happen in healthcare, starting to with the consumerization of care, but design, how you put something together, what colors you use, and what's interesting in this new AI agenda gauge is you can adapt the user interface and the design based on.

the user's age, culture, personality, language, health goals, insurance. And so, you know, a lot of the friction of care can be not designed out, but made much more engaging and even delightful.

Alison Curfman (13:00.832)
Yeah, you keep mentioning AI and I know you're quite an expert there. That was actually the keynote that you were giving when we met. And I also gave a keynote a few weeks later on AI to another physician audience. And one of the themes that I see in AI is that physicians are, while they're excited about some of the developments, they're a little concerned about where things are going. And I think that in general,

changes really hard. And in my opinion, the next handful of years is going to change at a faster pace than like the past 30 or 40 years of healthcare. What would you say to doctors about the fear about AI?

Daniel Kraft M.D. (13:47.411)
Well, buckle up and also get on the car. There's a famous quote that everyone modifies, you know, AI is not gonna replace your doctor or your nurse or your pharmacist, but the doctor, nurse, pharmacist, hospital system using AI is gonna replace those who don't. And so...

I don't think replacement is the right word, but it's going to change and augment and upscale and change some of the practice of whether it's primary care or robotically enabled surgery. So, you know, as you said, the pace of change is accelerating. It's only been, we're talking three years since ChatGPT launched into the world and, you know, it's evolved very fast. You know, now we have ambient scribing, you know, you can basically imagine in three years it might be malpractice not to use the AI agent and doing a diagnostic workup or therapeutic approach.

So and just how quickly this has changed when I was a Stanford medic, well as a fellow The first self-driving cars were going around campus, you know falling off the road on Stanford doing the DARPA

competition, now Waymo's will come to my front door. And I did a post the other day about what if healthcare was more like a self-driving car? Think about that's converges of all these technologies. It comes on demand, has your name on it, it has transparent pricing and adapts to the weather. You can imagine all that in our healthcare journeys. But I would say, know, things are gonna shift that needs to start with even medical school education. A medical student starting today in 2025, 2026 won't finish residency till 2033. That's how many iterations of our, since the chat CPD's launched.

I'd say don't wait for your institutions or healthcare systems to hand you the solution that you need to plug in and start trying them, finding them. That might be using open evidence or having a patient prescribe them a wearable device and looking at their steps if they just got discharged from a total hip surgery. There's a lot of ways to start implementing these things before your system imposes them on you. And then you can be both the need knower and the user and help shift and shape how we're gonna use these in clinical care.

Alison Curfman (15:39.254)
Yeah. And I think there's a lot of companies that are designing solutions. Well, basically every company is trying to decide how to use AI in their solution. And I think one of the roles of the physician in this space is to help design how we put guardrails on these things. I know we're all concerned about how new technology could affect patient safety. And we think back to things like the rollout of

EMRs and how did physicians do with that? And there was a lot of struggle with that. And then even looking at telehealth, which is where I spent a lot of my time. And I very vividly remember times that I would be giving a talk on telehealth and I would have people lined up in the aisle to yell at me and be like, this will never be a quality way to deliver healthcare. You cannot do an exam. And then now look at where we are today. We needed to develop

quality standards we needed to identify best practices in relation to a new tool or technology. It's not the tool that's inherently wrong or unsafe. It's, you know, are you getting the right voices and opinions involved in how you're going to use it?

Daniel Kraft M.D. (16:56.456)
How you use it, what data feeds the LLM, what values do you give it? Zach Kahane, who's a pediatrician at Harvard, runs sort of the bioinformatics program there, has some great perspectives on when you're training your LLM, what values do you give it? Is it valuing readmission rates or dollars or some sort of outcome element? We all have different values we grew up with, but hopefully we're pretty aligned in healthcare about do no harm and do the right thing for the patient. But in some cases, misaligned incentives or data sets can creep in. So how do you...

educate your AI models before they start to really educate us in dangerous ways. And how do you put the guardrails on, particularly in our political environment where they're trying to, in some cases, take all the guardrails off and make it illegal to have any guidance or guardrails at all? Because AI can be used to design a new drug or a bioterrorism weapon. You can make 3D printing to make a medical implant or to 3D print a gun. So all these things have

lots of power and they're only getting faster and cheaper and more available, which gives great power and great responsibility.

Alison Curfman (17:59.33)
Yeah. I think that when you talk about guardrails, it's interesting that things that change in healthcare, it takes what, like 17 years on average to get implemented. I think that innovation in healthcare has a very, very long lead time in the traditional setting. And same with health policy. A lot of times,

know, health policy takes a very long time to determine payment. And I think with AI, everything is going to be so accelerated that, like you said, we have to get comfortable at a more rapid pace of change.

Daniel Kraft M.D. (18:42.899)
Yeah, mean, the challenge is technology is often exponential. Moore's law, quantum computing is coming, multimodal data, low-cost genomics, proteomics, socio-omics. The challenge is, it's moving so quickly, it's faster than policy, regulatory reimbursement, ethics can keep up with. So how do you future-proof it? You're thinking if you're a...

medical student or attending or a seasoned department chair, you need to be thinking a little bit about where the program is going to be in two and five and 10 years and starting to design your residency programs and clinical platforms and hospital home elements so that they can integrate what might be here faster than you expect. So some of that is mindset and some of that is how we might need to change our training. I down the street at Stanford, there's no real course on digital health or AI for the medical students or a few electives. But how do you integrate that into care?

Pick someone from medical schools, got good EQ or IQ. Are they really good at organic chemistry? And the old models we are for memorization and regurgitation are better integration and synthesizing or coding or beyond. I don't have the answers, but it's a pretty interesting time now to rethink and reimagine almost every element of health and biomedicine.

Alison Curfman (19:51.63)
Absolutely. So you've obviously had your hand in a ton of startups and venture. And I think I remember that you recently started your own venture fund. Is that right?

Daniel Kraft M.D. (20:04.489)
Yeah, actually when I was a fellow, I was asked to do a Kauffman Fellowship, which is for younger, earlier VCs. And I sort of joined that and was a venture partner with a couple of funds. And then during the pandemic, when we were locked down, started a venture fund called Continuum Health Ventures, where we fund early stage digital health, health tech companies that will hopefully move the needle at the thesis of the superconvergence to improve the whole healthcare continuum. So.

We've done about 11 investments so far and it's really an interesting time to see the innovation come often from clinicians but also technologists who are outside of healthcare, former Googlers for example, who see a problem in their own personal or family's lives and solve for them. The challenge is now, know, it's the barriers to innovating are sometimes lower.

If you're building an AI solution now, the classic example recently being ambient computing, is that a company or a feature or is our friends at Epic, what I like to call Epic fail, you can delete that part or leave it in. They might build that as a new feature and that might squash your new AI elements. So in some cases it's getting easier to be entrepreneurial, but also these platform plays when are the of the controller of the user interface now.

Alison Curfman (21:06.552)
Yeah.

Daniel Kraft M.D. (21:17.747)
can sometimes suppress innovation or be a big gorilla when you're the David versus Goliath. But I'm a big believer that clinicians of all sorts are really often the need-knowers and now can collaborate with the kid down the street who can build the app or the engineer who can 3D print a device for you to really move things faster and not take 17 years. This idea of implementation science is

coming in and the EMRs today are building engines and documentation, but soon they're gonna be true co-pilots to care and will understand the multimodal data from your patient, including from their wearable and other data and give you hopefully the insights of what's really evidence-based for the patient in front of you rather than the average one based on some old randomized clinical trial.

Alison Curfman (22:00.002)
Yeah. And your point about what's a feature versus what is a company or a business is incredibly relevant. I talk to a lot of founders and sometimes I will talk to someone that, you know, they're building such a very specific point solution. It's not very comprehensive. It's definitely solving a very specific problem, but I think that health systems and practices will get to a point where they don't

they're not going to want to buy a hundred point solutions for every single little problem. They're probably going to, know, health systems will have a chief AI officer and a team that helps to build their own inter I mean, it's very easy to build with AI. So if you're having a problem with coding your, your surgeries or whatever, you probably going to internally build solutions as opposed to buy, you know, 250 new software vendors. So, um,

I talk to a lot of physicians who are hoping to become founders and often with an idea that does require some technical development. And I've guided them that, you know, if it is a very, very specific point solution problem, then it might be better as like a service company. like you're providing a clinical service and you're just using AI or whatever, you know, shortcut you're able to create with technology because you're still able to contribute value through your.

through the actual providing of medical service. That's your unique value. But I'm curious to know what sort of advice you have. I've run into a lot of physician aspiring founders who are struggling with trying to determine the best capital strategy or pathway forward when they are completely not technical. They are completely clinical. But they have a really great idea of how to fix something in their

specialty. I've talked to them about either finding a technical co-founder or a build for equity firm or obviously fundraising and paying for the technology themselves. But what are your thoughts on that?

Daniel Kraft M.D. (24:05.822)
think often, know, as physicians are often...

perfectionists and in the entrepreneurial sense, know, perfection can be the enemy of the good. I mean, it's not about moving fast and breaking things in the old Facebook model, but now if you have an idea, you can prototype it, build an MVP. It could be that med device you try on an animal model. It could be a 3D printed device you'd mock up on yourself. It could be a gene therapy. Don't use it on yourself. People have. But you can least build an early version and put it in someone's hands. It could be the app. It could be the device. It could be the...

potential pharmacologic agent and sort of do that kind of classic MBA discovery with potential customers and see if it has a potential fit. And of course the ability to iterate and build a mock-up now or even a video of an animation of what looks like is quake-abelling.

Alison Curfman (24:55.438)
Yeah, I often I've had doctors be like, oh, I have this vision for this platform and it would do this and that and the other. And this is how it would be impactful. maybe I'll just maybe I'll just invest to build it. And I tell them like, oh, my gosh, build a wireframe, build an example of it, build a technical requirements document with a few pretty pictures of what it could do, your vision of what it could do. So you're really able to communicate.

your vision for the technology, but I mean, you can, you can spend a lot of money on building tech. So I think that's something that physicians can struggle with if they have a technical idea.

Daniel Kraft M.D. (25:38.091)
And again, you don't need to be technical. I've experimenting with vibe coding and that allows you to iterate quickly and change something at the interface specifically and it'll help integrate smart design. Everyone's probably using Canva now to make everything from your business card to your pitch deck. So there's help there. But yes, so you can do a lot faster and with a lot less dollars before you actually start cutting metal or doing the clinical trial.

So I think it's a renaissance for entrepreneurship. again, you don't have to go get the MBA. You can partner with others. And in many cases, you can see an idea and get it launched faster, particularly in the digital health world, outside of the regulatory constraints. And I think the ability to be a practicing clinician, entrepreneurial, and understanding how your system works might be the best place to start.

Alison Curfman (26:28.098)
And now I have to ask you about your fascinating little side gig. Not many people say they have a side gig in what you say aerospace medicine.

Daniel Kraft M.D. (26:34.972)
Well, I grew up in Washington, D.C. area. I used to go to the Air and Space Museum all the time and watch the Two Fly movie. So I got very involved in interest in space. Actually, when I was a little kid, I was at the Apollo 17 launch, the last Apollo mission to have a man on the moon. Fast forward, when I was a medical student, I was at Johnson Space Center doing an aerospace medicine clerkship, and I met Gene Sir, the last guy on the moon. I actually put that into my last TED Talk as a theme.

But yeah, I always liked space and flying. I always wanted to be a fighter pilot, but I didn't really have 20-20 vision. And I got into medical school in the Air Force scholarship, but didn't want to be beholden to the Air Force. But I loved the space and flying piece. And so I got my pilot's license at Brown. I helped when I was a Stanford medical student join this Stanford aerospace engineering course, designing missions to Mars. was the only non.

engineer, but I'd done some work with NASA Space Life Sciences and had some insights there. I to a program called International Space University when I was a first year medical student in Toulouse, France, where we designed missions to Mars as well. All about cross collaboration and crossing fields. And from there, I actually found out you could join the Air National Guard and be a flight surgeon. So sort of get trained in aerospace medicine, be the doctor for the pilots. You're not operating in the sky as a flight surgeon. That's the old term of

the surgeon being the doc and your job is to take care of the pilots and the squadron and fly with them. So I got a lot of time flying in F-15s and F-16s, first in Cape Cod with an F-16 squadron, later when I came back to California with Massachusetts International Guard. that was a whole purview, a whole different world, military medicine, being part of a squadron, having to salute. I was more like the Hawkeye Pierce kind of character, you want me to do what? But it was a great experience on the military side, but also learning that it's sort of a conversion field of aerospace medicine and getting to combine passions.

I also did a lot of work with NASA, Johnson Space Center, NASA Ames, and wanted to be an astronaut. So I got to the very finals of astronaut selection, got flown down to Houston for a week of interviews. All went great, except my left eye couldn't quite get below 2200 on the uncorrected vision. You couldn't do LASIK back then. So I got medical doubt, ironically.

Alison Curfman (28:42.452)
my gosh, what a fascinating career you have had. I am so honored to have spent some time with you today and really appreciate all of your insights. Do you have any last thoughts or guidance for doctors that are wanting to explore doing things outside of the traditional clinical realm?

Daniel Kraft M.D. (29:01.918)
Well, you the challenge for medicine is you have to often follow a pretty traditional course, you know, do pretty well undergrad, maybe take a gap year or two, which is great. Go to medical school, get into the good residency, maybe do a fellowship, then you're on this path. So I would say don't be afraid to be a little bit of an outlier. Follow your passions. For me, it was like space and aviation. I was doing all these crazy space things and clerkships at Johnson Space Center and going post-golf for Mass General and going flying fighter jets. But that opens up your world.

I think the most entrepreneurial things happen at this convergence in the cross fertilization of fields. And one big shift for me when I was a.

Heemong postdoc at Stanford as I went to my first TED conference. This is before there were TED talks. This is in Monterey. And that opened up my world of having lunch with the founders of Google and Matt Groening. And that's a big line across the table for me and crossing art, technology, design, and getting out of the silo of academic medicine. And that catalyzed a lot of new relationships and ideas. I've stayed at Tedster. I've got four TED talks that were all accidental. But I think the magic of being an entrepreneurial clinician is

taking your blinders off a little bit, know, crossing fields, crossing technologies, looking where that convergence is going. If you're interested in that kind of mindset, I run a program now called NextMed Health, NextMed.health. We run a conference every year. That's a great place to get out of your silo, find folks from almost every field, from patients to startups to funders, and that's where we often kind of see the future a bit early. And that's sort of a theme, I think, that really helps entrepreneurs catalyze the future.

Alison Curfman (30:39.768)
That's incredible. And thank you so much for sharing that research and the work that you do. We will go ahead and put those links in the show notes. Thank you again so much for your time. We really appreciate it. And thank you everyone for listening. See you next time.

Daniel Kraft M.D. (30:55.467)
Thanks.