Physician Builder Spotlight: Gina Siddiqui
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 Gina Siddiqui, Founder and CEO of Carte Medical (more on the company’s mission below!). You can connect further with Gina on LinkedIn.
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On/Offcall is the weekly dose of information and inspiration that every physician needs.
1. Gina, what inspired you to become a physician entrepreneur? I think I pursue entrepreneurship to express my taste – how I think the world would be more awesome. Probably like many of you, my time practicing as a doctor has given me a long list of things I could see working better for patients and doctors. I love that as an entrepreneur, you get to design your taste/vision and see whether customers like it!
2. Tell us about what your company does and what problem you're trying to solve. Carte is trying to bridge the gap between the personalized, contextual, thoroughly considered, expert-driven medical decision making we all want for ourselves and our loved ones, and the time-constrained, generic "slop" that insurance-driven medical care is inexorably sliding us towards. Patients come to us for guidance on all their health affairs (annual memberships where we diligence all their specialists, testing they get done, and daily/weekly/quarterly health priorities) or for guidance on a single critical decision (shorter engagements where we do in-depth research and often line up meetings for them with world experts on their unique situation).
3. What's your advice to anyone in medicine who's thinking about entrepreneurship? Don't turn the work you have to do to be entrepreneurial bigger than it actually is. You don't need an MBA or to quit your job. You just need to be willing to carve out some time where you will start out quite dumb and inexperienced because you'll be doing something new. Then, to be a successful entrepreneur, all you need to do is to stick with the problems you explore until you become very competitive/good at them :-) Shameless plug - I also advise anyone passionate about going deep with patients and thoroughly researching cutting edge medicine to get in touch with us. We're always hiring amazing docs (see our careers page here). I'm also always happy to point you in the direction of other companies that may align with your interests too.
4. What's one lesson you've learned since building your company that wasn't obvious to you before? Before starting Carte, I had been on the founding teams of other startups and saw the ways single people and customers transform early company trajectories. I think it wasn't obvious until I became CEO the raw breadth of stuff that falls on the CEO to do well – especially in the early "zero to one" phase and in particular, when it comes to choosing what to focus on.
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If you are interested in learning more, you can reach out to Gina and learn more about her company here.
I'm a physician with a maker streak. After an ER residency and working in New York's public hospital systems during COVID, I took on a Chief Medical Officer role at a startup designing logic to better triage patients in ER waiting rooms (and eventually, from the comfort of their homes). Most recently, I founded Carte. Carte has let me be optimistic about the future of medicine with a brave team of patients and healers. If you want to be healthier on your own terms, or if you're a health practitioner who's hungry for deeper ability to change things for patients, or if you are a maker too who prioritizes time for your ideas more than anything else, I'd love to meet you and support you on your journey.