Physician Builder Spotlight: Dom Pimenta
We’re shining light on MD-entrepreneurs! Each week, we feature an entrepreneurial doctor who’s building a cool product, company, or working on a big idea that you definitely want to know about. This week, meet Dr. Dom Pimenta, CEO and Co-Founder at TORTUS, a London-based start-up that is building AI assistants for clinicians. You can connect further with Dom on LinkedIn.
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1. Dom, what inspired you to become a physician entrepreneur? During Covid, I was redeployed to Covid ITU from cardiology and I co-founded a charity to build sustainable PPE for colleagues across the UK. We raised £3.2m and delivered 500,000 items in the end, with the charity becoming a mental health and well-being support service for healthcare workers afterwards. It really showed me what happens when you find a difficult problem and try to solve it, and the impact that can be had when you bring together the right people around it.
Becoming a founder was something I had always been looking for but never really knew what it was. Founding TORTUS, I went through an accelerator called Entrepreneur First in the UK which is quite big now and in the U.S. too. That gave me the skills and network to then get into founding a startup.
2. Tell us what your company does and what problem you're trying to solve. TORTUS builds AI assistants for clinicians. Our initial problem to solve is the 60% of time clinicians spend on computer tasks – finding information, documenting new information, ordering, billing, scheduling etc. Compressing that to <15% time will double clinical capacity everywhere. Just imagine what we could do with twice as many doctors on shift.
3. What's your advice to anyone who's thinking about a nontraditional career in medicine? Do it. If it’s not for you, you’ll soon realise it. And if it is, you’ve just made the best decision of your life. To be an entrepreneur is to try and fail as fast as possible. You won’t know it’s not for you until you act. “Action is information” – I think that’s a Paul Graham quote.
4. How can a physician overcome their biggest fear to start a company/organization? You just have to start and ship something to somebody – these days you can vibe code a solution to a problem and test it in the real world (within governance reason) in hours. So why haven’t you yet?
As good as your idea is, ideas are increasingly cheaper and cheaper. It’s your ability to execute that really matters. Most physicians have never tried to execute a product vision so need to be humble about being bad at it, start practicing, and get better. Some of the maxims of medicine – “see one, do one, teach one” apply here. I met with many founders who had successfully founded startups and that gave me the boost to think I could too.
5. What's the #1 lesson you've learned since building your company that wasn't obvious to you before? Companies are just people fundamentally. Everything else is window dressing unless you have great people. The idea will change, the strategy evolves all the time, but the people that build the company ARE the company.
Everything about great people is 10x harder than you think, and it’s where most of the leverage in building actually comes from. So investing in people, understanding what amazing talent actually looks like, these are the most critical skills, especially if you’re coming from a non technical background like physicians.
6. Name the top resources you found most helpful to get going as an entrepreneur. Other entrepreneurs have been very useful. There are various Slack and WhatsApp groups as well that have communities of folks.
For me, the accelerator Entrepreneur First was literally life-changing. And lean into being a novice by reading expert advice and absorbing books. For me, High Output Management, Measure What Matters and The Hard Thing About Hard Things, plus anything by Paul Graham, are essential reading. Avoid advice from anyone who has never built something before. The world is full of pretenders in this space too.
7. How can other physicians support you? Open to all! Send me things at dom@tortus.ai
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I like making things. From diagnoses to hypotheses, from kitchen tables to Python models, from charities to companies; doing something new, exploring and building in a new area to the highest level is what I love. And now I'm making something again as CEO of TORTUS, an AI healthtech company co founded at Entrepreneur First and backed by Khosla Ventures. I'm wrapping up all of my clinical and tech dreams of the future, and with our ever expanding team and NHS partners, building that into reality. You can read more here https://tortus.ai. I was formerly the lead specialty research physician at Richmond Research Institute, running clinical trials in digital health and AI, publishing original research in everything from in-human physiology studies to artificial intelligence and cardiac imaging to Big Data and the relationships between food and health. I was formerly the clinical lead for Cardiology at ORCHA, the Organisation for the Review of Care and Health Apps (ORCHA)- bringing digital health in line with the core values of medicine; evidence, patient benefit, and rigor.