Medical Misfits

Ulrich is one of those very rare physicians who ended up leaving the hospital after spending a considerable amount of time in it. After studying medicine in Austria, he worked and qualified as a surgeon in Munich, where he also did research and completed his habilitation. While he still was (and is) very passionate about surgery, he decided to change his career by leaving the hospi

Let me start off by saying that Zoe is doing exactly the things which I should have done while I was in medical school. During her second year in medical school, she decided she wanted to try out something different on the side, and sent out around 30-40 applications for internships in various companies. That landed her her current part-time job at Melon, an EdTech startup where sh

I feel like that, with each guest I describe here, I always start off with “man, this person was really interesting and we had so much to talk about”. So I don’t want to sound repetitive or so, but man, Stephen Gilbert really was quite interesting and we had so much to talk about - so much that we ended up going over our scheduled time of one hour. There’s so much to unpack

Damn, where should I start - maybe with the fact that Johan was a professional poker player and, as a medical student, would spend nights playing poker to earn some money on the side? Or with the fact that he also worked as a warehouse worker, as a nurse, and was a semi-professional soccer player? Suffice to say, there are so many interesting things about Johan that one hour’s wo

The first thing which struck me when talking to Fabienne was that she was currently working from Bali. She’s an avid surfer and she describes it as a dream come true to be able to surf everyday while working remotely. The second thing which I found really interesting was that Fabienne was the first guest ever on my podcast who considers going back to the hospital as a doctor at s

Describing Luka Opasic as an interesting person would be quite an understatement. He is a doctor, software developer and researcher - and none of these titles describe him very well, as he's somehow a combination of all of these, but then again something different, too. He studied medicine in Zagreb, Croatia, and later did his PhD in Germany. In that context, he worked at the Max-P

The first thing I realized when talking to Paulina was that she has lots of stuff going on due to her impressive amount of energy - I wished I would have had that sort of motivation in medical school! But, before we got into all of that, I think the most interesting thing about Paulina is that she’s still working as a doctor in the hospital while building up her startup on the si

Matthew "Matt" Fenech is a doctor and now co-founder of a startup called Una Health which develops an app for diabetics to improve their nutrition and blood sugar management. Before co-founding Una Health in 2021, Matt worked at a think tank called Future Advocacy and as Medical Safety Lead at Ada Health. I think Matt is a really interesting person to talk to because his career pat

Ramin Azhdari is a doctor, software engineer and now a co-founder of his own startup, Vie de Médecin. We talk about how he transitioned to becoming a software engineer, why he thinks developing software is really exciting as a doctor, how he got his first software engineering job and about his own startup, a social network for doctors.