Physicians who want to work with startups often assume the hard part is getting an advisory title. In my experience, the more important work comes earlier: understanding what you know that a company could use, learning how startups think, and getting specific about where your experience creates value. I would listen to these five episodes in this order because they move through that sequence.
So You Want to Advise Startups? Here’s Exactly How to Get Started as a Physician Consultant
When I first tried to translate my own clinical and leadership experience into business language, I needed help seeing skills that had become invisible to me. I talk about that directly in this episode: “there were skills that I didn’t even know were skills.” Years of clinical work can make certain forms of judgment feel ordinary even when they are difficult for a startup to acquire.
You may know how a care pathway works, why clinicians reject a workflow, how decisions get made inside a hospital, or which evidence will change practice. A company may spend months trying to learn what you already know. The first step is not adding another credential. It is learning to describe the value of the experience you already have.
Listen: So You Want to Advise Startups? →
From Function to Value: Why Startups Pay for Physician Expertise
This episode answers a practical question: what is a company paying for when it hires a physician advisor or consultant? I use three categories because they move the conversation away from credentials and toward outcomes. A physician can help a company grow revenue, reduce costs, or reduce risk.
Clinical expertise might shape a better product, make a sales strategy more credible, identify an implementation problem before it becomes expensive, or help a team understand how physicians will respond to a new model. Take something you know how to do and ask what changes for the company because you are there. That is the beginning of a useful consulting offer.
Listen: From Function to Value →
The 7 Startup Functions Physicians Can Support
The title advisor is too broad to be a useful career plan. Startups need help across product, marketing, business development, clinical research, user insight, policy, and strategy, and this episode maps those functions to work physicians already do. One line from the episode captures the practical point: “you need a menu.”
A founder should be able to understand what you can help with, not simply that you are a physician who is interested in startups. For one doctor, that menu may center on clinical product review and physician user research. For another, it may be clinical trial strategy or business development. The goal is to identify the one or two areas where you can be unusually useful.
Listen: The 7 Startup Functions Physicians Can Support →
How Patient Care Prepares You to Work With Startups
This episode is useful if you worry that you lack formal business training. Clinical practice trains us to diagnose problems, make decisions with incomplete information, manage risk, communicate with people who have different priorities, and adjust when new information changes the picture. Those abilities do not make someone a complete startup executive on day one, but they provide a strong foundation.
The missing piece is usually context. You need to learn how a startup makes money, how products get built and sold, how customers buy, and how teams make decisions. Once you understand that context, many clinical skills become much easier to translate.
Listen: How Patient Care Prepares You to Work With Startups →
Physician Side Hustles in Startup Advisory and Health Tech Consulting with Dr. Mary Parman
Mary Parman spent more than 20 years practicing OB/GYN before developing work in health tech consulting and startup advisory. Her path did not depend on abandoning medicine or announcing a complete career reinvention. She started meeting founders, learning where her experience was useful, and building opportunities through relationships.
Our conversation covers compensation, advisory pipelines, and why the first conversation with a company should usually be about learning rather than selling. I recommend the same approach to physicians who are starting now: choose an area you understand, find companies working on problems in that area, and pay attention to the questions founders keep asking you. Repeated questions often reveal the service people would eventually pay you to provide.
Listen: Physician Side Hustles with Dr. Mary Parman →
If you are new to startup advisory, I would not binge these in one afternoon. Listen to one, do the exercise it suggests, and then move to the next. By the end, you should have a more specific answer to three questions: what you know, where that knowledge fits inside a startup, and what kind of work you want to test first.
