Healthcare has always been built on scarcity. Throughout human history, there have never been enough doctors and nurses to meet demand, so care gets rationed. Today, we’re entering a platform shift as AI pushes the cost of clinical work toward zero. Munjal Shah, co-founder and CEO of Hippocratic AI, joins me to talk about building safe clinical AI agents, why vertical apps will beat one-size-fits-all models, and his biggest lessons as a four-time founder.
Hippocratic AI builds clinical voice agents that talk to patients by phone for health systems, payers, and pharma companies, and has already handled over 290M patient interactions. Safety was a priority for Munjal, and the company waited 18 months to ship until its agents tested safer than human nurses.
As a founder, Munjal has ridden each major platform shift. He sold his first company to Alibaba and his second to Google. His next venture, a decade-long healthcare startup, didn’t succeed. Rather than end on a loss, he started Hippocratic weeks after seeing ChatGPT. “Wait and wait and wait until you see a forest fire, and then start a company,” he advises.
As a founder, Munjal argues for building a bigger founding team even at the cost of more equity. He also makes the case that AI safety is an engineering problem, and that the companies shipping AI should own the risks of what they ship.
We end with his hard-earned advice for founders building in AI: find a corner of the market where the big players’ design constraints don’t fit and run into the vertical as fast as you can. The best openings are in the “troughs,” the places where today’s frontier models still fall short.
What we covered:
00:00 – Cold open
00:55 – What Hippocratic AI does
01:25 – Munjal’s founder journey
05:13 – Why founders should wait for their “forest fire” moment
08:15 – Lessons learned across four startups
14:23 – Creating culture by design
16:10 – If you don’t think it’s safe, don’t ship it
23:52 – Why AI labs’ messaging feels contradictory
25:30 – Second-order effects and why AI predictions miss them
26:30 – Saving $400K by moving to open source.
31:50 – Why vertical AI will win
35:15 – Targeting the “troughs” in jagged AI intelligence
37:12 – The Copilot, Autopilot, Infinite Pilot framework
39:40 – The abundance revolution
Links:
Munjal Shah: linkedin.com/in/munjalshah747
Hippocratic AI: https://www.hippocraticai.com/