Physician VC Dr. John Dayton on What It Takes to Actually Build a Winning Healthcare Startup

Dr. John Dayton is an emergency physician, Stanford innovation fellow, and co-founder of Wildfire Partners, a new healthcare seed fund built around a simple but data-backed conviction: physicians make better health tech founders than the industry has ever given them credit for.The data is hard to ignore: more than a quarter of billion-dollar healthcare companies built in the last decade had at least one clinician co-founder. John did not just write that paper. He built a fund around it.In this episode of How I Doctor, Dr. Graham Walker sits down with John to dig into what it actually takes to build a health tech company worth funding. They walk through John's Seven Ps framework for evaluating startups, what makes a pitch compelling versus an instant red flag, and why the barrier to entry for physician-founders has never been lower thanks to AI.What You'll Learn in This Episode:The Seven Ps framework John uses to evaluate every health tech company he considers fundingWhat kills a pitch immediately and what signals a founder has actually done their homeworkWhy AI has dramatically lowered the barrier to entry for physician-founders and what that changes about building a company todayHow to think about the principal-agent problem when selling into health systemsWhy ambient AI tools matter more for physician burnout than the time savings data alone suggestsWhat John learned about scalable, practical problem solving from practicing in resource-poor clinical environmentsWhat winning actually looks like and why it is about more than financial🩺 Offcall is more than a platform — it’s a community. Join today!📝 For a full transcript of this episode click HERE🎧 Subscribe to receive new How I Doctor episodes directly in your feed here: https://episodes.fm/1767429315👨‍⚕️Follow Dr. Graham Walker onLinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/graham-walker-md/IG https://www.instagram.com/ubergraham/Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/drgrahamwalker.com✉️ Join our newsletter On/Offcall here https://offcall.beehiiv.com/subscribe🟧 Follow Offcall onLinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/joinoffcall/IG https://www.instagram.com/offcalldotcom/TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@offcalldotcom