Fired by Elon, Meta & Wendy’s, Now Raising Millions for Hello Patient

4 Sep 2025 · 55 min

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Podcast Summary: Sourcery - Fired by Elon, Meta & Wendy’s, Now Raising Millions for Hello Patient

Episode Overview In this episode of *Sourcery*, host Molly O’Shea interviews Alex Cohen, founder and CEO of Hello Patient. Alex shares his unconventional journey in the tech industry, where he has been fired from over 11 companies including high-profile names such as Elon Musk’s X, Meta, and CrowdStrike. His story is one of resilience and creativity, culminating in a successful fundraising effort for his AI healthcare platform, Hello Patient, which recently raised $22.5 million in Series A funding.

Key Themes and Discussions

  1. The Underdog Story
  2. Numerous Firings: Alex humorously recounts being fired from 11 companies, framing it as a part of his development and contributing to his authentic persona.
  3. Resilience: Each firing contributed to his self-deprecating humor and authenticity, which resonates well in the entrepreneurial landscape.
  1. Innovative Marketing Strategies
  2. Parody as Marketing: Alex discusses the effectiveness of parody videos created for marketing, especially highlighting a successful launch video that parodied companies like Humane and individuals like Sam Altman and Jony Ive.
  3. Viral Presence: Alex leverages his social media presence (220k+ followers on X) to create relatable content that engages potential customers and investors.
  1. Hello Patient: An Overview
  2. Company Mission: Hello Patient develops conversational AI agents that handle patient-facing workflows across various platforms (phone, text, web chat), improving patient experience and reducing staffing challenges.
  3. Impact on Healthcare: The platform aims to enhance patient engagement, addressing missed appointments and communication bottlenecks in healthcare settings.
  1. Fundraising Success
  2. $22.5 Million Series A: The episode highlights the recent fundraising round led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from 8VC, Bling Capital, and others.
  3. Diligence Process: Alex outlines the quick fundraising process, meeting with numerous firms and securing a term sheet within three weeks.
  1. Technology and AI in Healthcare
  2. Emphasis on Patient Engagement: Alex elaborates on how Hello Patient is transforming patient engagement through AI, emphasizing the importance of omnichannel communication.
  3. Future of AI in Healthcare: There is a consensus that while AI has potential, it is still not ready for clinical decision-making, focusing instead on administrative tasks.
  1. The Role of Storytelling
  2. Importance in Fundraising: Alex stresses storytelling as a critical skill for founders, aiding in investor relations and customer acquisition. He enjoys the process of sharing authentic narratives that resonate with audiences.
  1. Peptides and Health Optimization
  2. Exploration of Peptides: Alex shares his experiences with various peptides for health optimization, discussing their effects on muscle recovery, sleep, and overall well-being.
  3. Cultural Perspectives on Health: The conversation touches on societal attitudes towards health, weight loss, and the modern food system in America.

Key Takeaways

  • Persistence and Humor: Alex’s journey highlights the importance of resilience and humor in navigating the tech landscape.
  • Creative Marketing: Leveraging social media and innovative marketing strategies can significantly enhance a startup’s visibility and attractiveness to investors.
  • AI’s Role in Healthcare: The ongoing evolution of AI presents opportunities and challenges, particularly in patient engagement and operational efficiency.
  • Health Optimization Trends: The rise of peptides and similar substances reflects a growing interest in personal health optimization, driven by societal challenges in nutrition and wellness.

Closing Remarks Alex Cohen's story is a testament to the power of creativity, humor, and resilience in entrepreneurship. His innovative approach with Hello Patient is addressing critical gaps in healthcare communication, and his unique marketing strategies demonstrate the potential of social media as a tool for business growth.

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For more insights and updates, follow Alex Cohen on [X](https://x.com/anothercohen) and Molly O’Shea on [X](https://x.com/MollySOShea). You can also check out the Sourcery podcast on [Sourcery VC](https://x.com/sourceryvc).

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Transcript

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0:00This is a story Silicon Valley has never seen before. You were fired from Astronomer. Yes, recently. You were fired by Elon Musk? Twice. Meta. Yes, the DEI initiative. CrowdStrike? I do remember that one. It took down the internet. What happened? I just pulled the wrong plugs in the server room and next thing you know all of our customer websites go down. I can understand why you got fired. I think a lot of stuff shifted in Q1 of this year where everyone just got like comfortable with AI. If you go on Google and you search for dentists and you call and they don't answer, you're probably calling the next one and the next one and the next one until someone picks up, says they take your insurance, offers you an appointment and that means that that marketing funnel for them is really important.

0:38We build conversational AI for healthcare practices. We exclusively deal with patient-facing communications. I think we're ways away from like Dr. GPT. How far do you think we are from AGI? We're pretty far. What's the date?

1:00Alex Cohen. And Molly, welcome to Sorcery. Thank you. We flew out here just for this. You flew out here just for this? No, we flew out here for the video, but it was perfect timing. Fair. Okay. So we have a lot of announcements today. Yeah, we do. We need to talk about the big announcement. We need to talk about, I don't know what's bigger, the video or the announcement? Hopefully the video. I think that's more exciting than the announcement. You care more about the video. Yeah. Yeah. Every time. Every time we do a raise, it's like in conjunction with a parody video. So it feels like that's the thing to talk about.

1:35We're also going to talk about Hello Patient. Yeah. That's important too. Your underdog story. You've been fired by a lot of companies. How many now? Did you count? I can count right now. I saved all of them. I went on Twitter and I looked it up. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. It's a lot of companies. Yeah. Can't hold down a job. Pretty brutal. And then we'll also talk about peptides. Of course. Okay. So to start things off, break down the video. What was the creative direction here? You know, when we initially launched November last year, so less than a year ago now, we parodied the Humane video.

2:17It was like the perfect. I remember seeing that video where they, you know, they took out the little devices on the table and they put the pin on and they're just stale face and, um, you know, RIP humane, uh, rest in peace. But it was the perfect medium for doing a launch video where you have a phone on a table. And I had this like whole vision in my mind and I called up our video production agency. I was like, we need to parody this video. And now, um, here we are like nine months later closing the series A and I'm like, we need to parody another video. And like, what do we do? and the latest video to have gone viral with a bit of that like cringe element is the Sam Altman, Johnny Ive, IO announcement video.

2:54And so we, we originally were not going to do it. I actually was like, no, we shouldn't do this. We should do this like cool futuristic video showing like the medical receptionist before and then after. And very serendipitously, I was on a call with someone and she was like, I'm a massive shit poster on Twitter too. And we were talking about like launch videos and she was like, you should do another parody video. And I was like, yeah, I have like one idea in mind and she goes to the Johnny I video and I was like, all right, fuck it. We have to do it. And so literally three weeks later it's recorded and shot.

3:24And like two weeks later it's live. So here we are. Oh my God. And I go all out for these. I mean, we've got the gray sweater that matches. Let's see it. Do the fashion show. You're in the exact same outfit. I know. We've got the blue gray jeans that I had custom picked out at Nordstrom. And then of course, can you see those Lego shoes? The classic Sam Altman Lego shoes that I had to go buy from Goat because they don't sell them anymore. And so we've got the whole outfit down. Jeremy Kaufman, our lead investor at Scale, I literally went on eBay. I bought a safari jacket from Banana Republic. Like that's what Johnny was wearing in the video.

4:04A Banana Republic jacket. Yeah. Banana Republic safari style jacket. It was very specific. White linen pants and then like chukka boots to match the boots. The one thing that I could not buy, sadly, was matching glasses because I found out Johnny had those custom made by an eyeglass manufacturer that only makes like 400 pairs of glasses a year, all custom made for like celebrities. So we went with Warby Parker for that one. What's the point of raising this capital if you're not going to get the sunglasses? That feels like a bad use of funds after. I mean, I guess in the grand scheme of things, you're making an expensive video like perhaps we go spend the$2 ,000 on glasses.

4:40But to my investors, we did not do that. Okay, responsible. Frugal. Well, how does it feel to be Sam Altman? It's weird. I mean, now I'm in the right city for it. But, you know, I posted like a selfie of me in the outfit into a group chat with like Trung and a couple other shit posters. And Trung replies, Sam Altman, if he could bench two plates.

5:04That'll be good for our peptide segment. Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. We should be recording this in Austin with the peptides and the lifting and like that culture in Austin. So. I mean, Joe Rogan's there. Peter T is there. I don't think Huberman. Is Huberman there? He's in Malibu. Okay. He's too good for Austin. But Austin's a massive like peptide. I feel like it's a massive peptide scene. Part two, peptide testing. Yeah. Perfect. I'll take some peptides and then I'll go to the gym with you. Yeah. They take a little bit longer than like a day to kick in, but like we'll get you on like a three-week cycle, four-week cycle, and then by the end you'll be a whole new person.

5:41Okay, great. I'm so excited. Okay, so I think we should just, let's talk about your underdog story. This is a story Silicon Valley has never seen before. Okay, so let's talk about the firing. You've been fired by 11 companies. 10, 11 companies. I'm going to go through all these. It's pretty dramatic. I never knew you could be fired from these before. I thought they had like tenure and stuff. Alex, you were fired from Astronomer. Yes, recently. You were fired by Elon Musk. Twice. Meta. Yes, the DEI initiative. Wendy's. I don't remember getting fired from that one, but yes. You don't remember what happened there?

6:20No. Oh, my God. What was the tweet? I just can't believe this. Okay. Crowdstrike. I do remember that one. It took down the internet. You took down the internet? Yeah, by accident. What happened? I just pulled the wrong plugs in the server room, and next thing you know, all of our customer websites go down. I think you also stopped flights around the world. Oh, yes. Yeah, it was big. That was a bad one. The Harris campaign? Well, that's an obvious, but yeah. Rat didn't work out? No, no. Pushing her through the primary didn't work out. What about that interview on 60 Minutes? We tried to cut it out.

7:01Okay. Yeah, it didn't work. I can understand why you got fired. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, you were also fired for being the DEI coordinator for the IRS. Yeah. That was an interesting one. Can you explain? I have to go back and look at the tweet to remember what I did there. I've been fired from so many jobs that I forget. Did you read it recently? Do you want me to pull it up? Yeah, we should. Okay. Let's pull it up. Your job was to make sure that men paid higher taxes than women. Oh, yes. Yeah. Success. Success. What was the other one you wanted to check? Wendy's? Wendy's. Let's fact check on Wendy's.

7:39Okay. You were the VP of innovation who came up with the idea of surge pricing for our menus. Oh, yeah. Wendy's poached you from BMW, where you had a successful career leading the team that rolled out subscriptions for customers that you used their heated seats. That was a real thing that they did. That is. That I did. It's true. You did that. Yeah. After Elizabeth Warren's tweet today, Wendy's leadership fired you immediately. They gave you three months severance. That's pretty good. Yeah. Oh. unlimited spicy nugs for the rest of my life. It was in the form of a gift card that could only be used on Frosties.

8:15Well, that's not the worst thing. I do love a good Frosty. Damn. Remember the Frosty keychains? I know we're going so off topic, but like they used to sell these Frosty keychains for like five bucks or something. And then every time you showed up to Wendy's, you could get a Frosty for either free or a dollar or something like that. By having a keychain? It's like a keychain membership perk that they did. That wasn't my initiative. But no, that was a thing that I had in high school. Okay. Well, that's good to know. Well, it said you needed to take some time to reset before jumping into the next disruptive role.

8:49Yeah. Wendy's is innovative. And that you did. Falling behind Chick-fil-A though. We didn't even make it through the list yet. Oh, no. You also got fired by Google. Yes. Do you remember? They've done so many things there that it's hard to remember which one was my fault. You were laid off from Google. You were in charge of making the algorithms for Gemini as woke as possible. Sounds like something that we would do over there. God, Gemini was really woke when it first came out, though. Hey, they tested the limits. Yeah. We needed to know. It's true. Implicit bias. Yeah. Okay. And then we have two left.

9:29One of them was Twitter badge access. Yes. That was where this whole thing kind of, this whole like shtick started was. That was the original? Yeah, that was the original was Elon takes over Twitter. Internet's all angry at him. I don't remember why, but I used it as an opportunity to joke that like he locked himself out of the building and everyone loves a good shot in food story. And so they loved this idea that like Elon took over Twitter aggressively and then was locked out of Twitter. And so it got like 350 ,000 likes and Elon responds and he's like, thanks for letting us back in. And that was really that I was like, OK, there's like something here with this format.

10:06So the last company you were fired from was Carbon Health? No, Astronomer, like a week or like a month ago. But like last real company, I suppose, Carbon. Were you actually fired from them? No. No? No. Oh my God. Sadly, the one real company I had, I voluntarily left in January last year. Okay. And you did that to build? Hello Patient. Hello Patient. Yes. And raise lots of money. I didn't know that I was going to build Halepation at the time. I left because Carbon materially changed as a business. We went from being a software heavy company with a big R &D team and running healthcare clinics to just like, we need to run healthcare clinics only.

10:51And you can't, like most healthcare companies or groups or clinics cannot justify a big software team. And so when that happened and we went through a lot of recalibration, I still loved my time at carbon. I never thought I would leave. Um, but I wanted to do something besides go just like build urgent care chains. And so I think maybe like a month into that journey of figuring out what was next, I started playing around with voice AI products. Maybe it was like Cartesia at the time or someone who had just come out with their first model. And, um, I was like, Oh, like there's something here. And like, this is the thing that I try to automate a carbon in 2021 when I had joined and took over the call center operations there.

11:29And so that was the impetus for like, hey, we should like go build. And I had my whole team at Carbon basically who had left as well, or got laid off in different rounds of layoffs. And I was like, I have this amazing team. We know healthcare exceptionally well. I literally built all the patient engagement and patient experience and call center experience at Carbon. Like this is the perfect thing. And then we raised our round. And you just raised your round. And now we raised another round. Yeah. Yeah. So we raised 3.8 originally. Then 8VC, we were like maybe like five months, no, like four months in.

12:03And the partner, Sebastian at 8VC, we were like doing a demo. I'm showing him how intricate like the internal tooling is. And he's like, do you want more money? And I was like, okay. And so we ended up raising a bit more. And then now fast forward, yeah, September. This will come out in September. Yeah. We've raised a$22.5 million Series A. Congratulations. Thank you. So what was the process like for the Series A? Who was involved? I mean, from like investors or our side. I mean, we met with a bunch of firms, probably like 20 or 25 over the course of three weeks. It was a three-week process end to end.

12:38So I went out originally having like, I was out here in SF having conversations with some folks, just kind of letting them know I was gearing up for a raise. And we had started to like really grow customer traction and starting to sign more and more larger healthcare groups. kind of that second week we started to go into diligence had a data room they went through all that and then um third week we got a term sheet and then we ended up signing the term sheet uh like literally the friday of the third week who led the round scale venture partners and abc participated yeah all of our original investors did so the seed round was abc bling capital max ventures um the extension was or like the top up whatever you want to call it was also all three of them.

13:22Like they all kept wanting to do more. And then, um, this round, like scale wrote the largest check, but every single one of our investors took their full parada. And then we took on a few more, um, like strategic investors. So we raised from alumni ventures. Those guys are ex CBS ventures. Um, we raised from Lord David Pryor in the UK. He's going to kill me when he hears that, but he's great. He's, uh, he's the old, um, chairman of the NHS in the UK. and then we raised from Remus Capital, smaller fund in Boston who's got deep private equity connections and then there are a few other like folks in the mix basically.

13:58Yeah, that's pretty incredible. I mean, I think we also need to address the elephant in the room and the dramatic shift of vibe that just happened. Yeah, it was like immediate. Immediate seriousness. This is what happens. Yeah. When people go, how do you go from like, yeah, like shit posting to real life conversations. It's like flip of a switch. Flip of a switch. Yeah. Multiple personalities. Yeah, I might have an issue, but like that's a problem for future me. Yeah. But okay, so let's talk about that a bit. So how did you like manage posting and being like so strong with communications and marketing?

14:34I guess like online written is like, it definitely is your super superpower. How did that affect like any of these processes or even just like starting a company? I never thought I'd be like viral on Twitter. Um, when I started posting 2018, I remember vividly the year because I was working, I had sold the first company or working for the acquiring company. They had like a no, a hard no on like social policy. And I always felt like locked up. I was like, I can't post anything like this is dumb. And, um, and I'd been on Twitter for a while as a reply guy before that I deleted a lot of my old tweets of like replying to random VCs who were raising for the first company.

15:12I don't know, for whatever reason, I've always had a satirical, like terrible sense of humor. And it was like the perfect, Twitter was the perfect medium for just like posting dumb satirical, either like stories or jokes or like a lot of it was self-deprecating humor. I kind of joked that Twitter is my standup comedy. Cause like I do, like I would joke about product managers and I am a pro I was a product manager and like people thought that was funny and then I just kept doing it and doing it and all of a sudden it would just like snowball and yeah here I still do it for the love of the game there's like no ulterior ulterior motive with Twitter I don't do it because I want like a million followers I just like find it fun I think that's pretty uh that's pretty admirable yeah and it's like made some good money throughout the years I used to like ghost write for a few different companies during COVID when like they all had extra money to go spend um I had a brand deal with ButcherBox for a bit really so they would send me like free meat and pay me to tweet about the meat, which was fun.

16:09Um, I've done some stuff with eight sleep. So like, it's been good. I don't, it's not anywhere near a full-time job. I just like post whatever. I would just fire from the hip. There's no planning. Wow. It's impressive. How many followers do you have? Two, just probably shy of 230 ,000. What do you think your average like engagement is? Um, the bangers, it's like, just saying that out loud, but the bangers is like five to 10 K is like a good one um if i likes yeah likes that's insane yeah i would say like whenever you see one sort of like trailing towards 100k you know it's a really solid one the astronomer one i think was like 200 000 likes i think you tweeted about astronomer like 40 times yeah that was like my soup when there's an event like that it's like the shit posting super bowl like all hands on deck everyone's just firing memes away it's amazing the group chats go crazy and then i would say my average which is probably a few hundred, like just, uh, it's always weird.

17:05I forget that I have 230 ,000 followers. And, um, for a while, like originally when I was like really into it, I was getting stopped in person as I was going from like, probably like a hundred to 200 K was the most amount of appearances in real life where like people would find me. I was, I remember being at the bank in Austin and someone turns around and they're like, Oh, you're Alex from Twitter. And I was like, well, how the fuck do you know who I am? And, uh, and I'm in a bank. Like, that's weird. And then I remember being at the park in my neighborhood and with my probably two year old at the time.

17:37And there's another dad on the playground. It's a Saturday morning. I'll like, never forget this. And he, after like five minutes of us both being at the park, he's like, you're the neighborhood shit poster, aren't you? And I was like, Oh, I got to move out of this neighborhood. So I, uh, that's why I have a baby as a profile pic. Cause I like to try to keep a bit of that. Is it a baby? It was like me as a baby. Oh, yeah. Like me as a toddler or however old I was in that photo, just because like then less people recognize me in real life and they'll see me on things like this and the launch video.

18:06And like, I don't, I don't generally, like if you see me in real life, like say hi, I don't think it's awkward. I just don't want it to happen that often. I get that. So how does that translate into a competitive advantage for being a founder or CEO? It's really just like access to anyone. I can DM anyone and they'll write back usually. And so that's probably the biggest thing is either I can put an ask out into the wild and like someone will connect. I've had like multiple billionaires reach out to be like, I can do the help you with X, Y, and Z thing. And so I think it's just like that. It doesn't really help from a recruiting perspective.

18:38Besides, I think when people know about my Twitter and then they actively come interview, they kind of get a sense of what the culture is like. And like we have a shit posting channel internally in Slack. And so I think it helps with some of that, but yeah, mostly just like network. Did you have any issues with investors fundraising or at all from the beginning? No, it actually probably helps fundraising. I think like you have to be really good at storytelling to like actually do the posting. And I think that translates to storytelling, the vision and the pitch and even like selling. I fucking, I love sales.

19:08It's my favorite thing to do. And so it helps with, I think they kind of get the vibe that you can tell a story to anyone. So it really helps there. Funny enough, like during this recent round with scale, they do background checks on all their founders and they go like deep. And apparently Jeremy, our lead investor gets a call from their, like, I don't know if it's their GC or someone. I don't know if I should share this, but whatever. I don't think he'll care. And, um, they were like, did you know Alex has quite an online social presence? And he was like, yes, I know. He has some posts out there.

19:40Yeah. Yeah. Um, but it helps. I mean, like literally since our launch video, like majority of our traffic has come inbound now, like to our website. And like, even healthcare providers reaching out, I'll get the occasional like chief growth officer at a dermatology group. It's like, I love your LinkedIn posts and your Twitter posts. And like, I think that there's this misconception in healthcare that everyone's boring and stodgy and like has no sense of humor. And that's probably true if you're a patient. Yeah. It's not true if you're like in a business relationship with them. That was what my next question was going to be is like, how does this translate to then healthcare and healthcare sales?

20:16I mean, indirect. I mean, definitely the LinkedIn is like, I love, I love posting on LinkedIn. I hate LinkedIn as a platform, but it's amazing for posting and meeting people. But all the folks who end up that we end up working with that know me from Twitter and LinkedIn, like just think it's funny. It kind of, and then most of the folks who don't know me are just like not online and that's fine too. They just don't know that this entire persona exists. Sorcery is brought to you by Brex, the financial stack trusted by more than 30 ,000 companies, including one in three venture-backed startups in the U.S.

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21:31Start today at brex.com slash sorcery. That's B-R-E-X dot com slash sorcery. sorcery. Okay. So now we have to shift into a serious, serious conversation. That wasn't serious. We'll be more serious. Okay. So let's talk about Hello Patient. Let's talk about the company, how you started, what you're providing now, how it's evolved. Yeah. Start with one of those questions. I'll give the high level real quick and then we can go into any part of it that's interesting. But in a nutshell, we build conversational AI agents or, you know, whatever you want to call them, but conversational AI for healthcare practices that we exclusively deal with patient facing communication.

22:13So that means that if you call inbound to a clinic, we want to answer the phone. If you want to run a campaign and reach out to a patient and get them in for a missed allergy shot, like we want to call outbound to or text outbound. So we do phone texting and now we have a chat bot that lives in our customers websites and that can have a whole chat experience with a patient. So we are full omni-channel inbound and outbound exclusively for healthcare, exclusively for patient-facing workflows. So if a provider reaches out to us and they say, hey, can you call UnitedHealthcare and like go appeal all my denials or go like try to get a prior authorization done?

22:46That's not the work that we do. Taking a step back and talking about the broader landscape of technology, especially in a regulated paper-driven industry like healthcare, what has this process been like? And are you seeing more adoption now like much easier? Yeah. So everything kind of shifted beginning of this year. I think like chat GPT has what? 800 million weekly active users now. That I think actually expanded the Overton window for providers getting comfortable with, oh, there's this chat experience that I could see working with my patients. And then they started to experiment with open AIs or chat GPT's voice models, right?

23:25They can just like talk to open AI. Grok, like you can now talk to your Tesla. We had, we were on a call and someone was like, this doesn't sound as good as like my Tesla Grok. And I was like, yeah, cause it's on like a low, anyway, I argued him about that. But I think a lot of stuff shifted in Q1 of this year where everyone just got like comfortable with AI and comfortable with the voices, the voices and the latency and the intelligence finally got to a minimum acceptable place where people said, okay, I want to experiment with this in my clinics now. And so we're seeing, I wouldn't say like mass adoption yet where everyone's like, I need this and I need it now and go roll it out to my 500 clinics.

24:02But they're like, I know I need to do something in AI. Like, who am I going to choose to be my partner and roll like conversational AI out in my practice? What's the sales process like for you? Typically, we will do an initial call, like learn everything that we can in 30 minutes about a practice, figure out like who's the buyer on the team. We also just hired our director of sales and she's fucking incredible. So we poached her from a medical supply company. Then after that, usually like do another call with a demo and then we'll put together like a real POC for them. So we'll go scrape everything from their websites.

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24:36We'll go like scrape their booking flows, go scrape their services and we'll go build an agent, put it behind a phone number and just send it to them and be like, just call in, like share it with the team, call in, text in. This is not a hundred percent, but it's like 70 % of the experience that you'll get. And that last 30 % is actually the hard work of doing an integration with their practice management system with understanding all their triaging flows. So like, let's say, for example, we do a lot of work with ENT groups today, like ear, nose, and throat doctors. And so if you call in for a sinus infection, like what are the triaging paths that we need to ask you to determine, is this an urgent thing or can we schedule a routine appointment?

25:13But if you call in for like hearing loss, is that an immediate thing? then that might require like an appointment with an audiologist and then doing a um like a hearing exam so there's like a lot of nuance that last 30 percent of how you get it right with an agent over the phone you cover many different verticals i'd love for you to go through those and then also like share how they differentiate at least um which ones you're seeing more growth and adoption with um so the verticals in health care that we operate in today are urgent care primary care ENT and allergy, mental and behavioral health, med spas.

25:48Like those are kind of the big five for us. We're starting to do more work in vision care. So like your optometry groups, and then starting to do a little bit of work in dental and like what they all share in common, there's a lot of patient choice. So if you go on Google and you search for a dentist and you're looking for a new dentist, like, and you usually are yearly to get a cleaning or something like that. And you call and they don't answer. You're probably calling the next one and the next one, the next one until someone picks up, says they take your insurance, offers you an appointment, and then you book.

26:16And that means that that marketing funnel for them is really important. And so all these specialties share that characteristic where patient choice is just like very abundant and you're fighting for those clicks. And like, if you have a 30 % missed call rate in your clinic, you are missing a bunch of just like free patient volume that's coming to you. Do you have to get different regulatory clearances for each one? Like what's No, there's no like individual specialty regulations we have to jump through, but we do have to be HIPAA compliant. We do have to sign BAs with every customer. We hold like very high liability insurance.

26:49And so, and then we bear a lot of risk in terms of we can never leak patient data. We can't give an AI like unfettered access to an electronic health record system. And so there's a lot of things that we have to do to protect patient data, which we do. And we try to save as little as possible to our systems. Like I don't want all the patient data living on my, like on my, in my databases basically. And so anyway, we sign all those agreements and then we bear risk there. We also bear risk when it comes to like telephony communication laws. And so making sure that we're not like calling people at midnight or texting them at 3am or 10 times a day.

27:25So there's a few different like regulatory hoops to jump through. How do you measure the impact? From an inbound perspective, it's pretty straightforward. It's like you were at 80 % answer rate. now you're at 100%. You know, you can kind of attribute appointments to us. If we booked the appointment, you know, it came from us. But I would say more importantly, it's like that answer rate, patients not waiting on hold, like they're happier now. And then on the outbound side, it's very clear, like those are hard ROI use cases where we're saying, you have 10 ,000 patients at your practice, let us call them all, you know, to go and like get them scheduled for their next appointment.

27:56And if we booked that appointment, like we did that marketing campaign, and we essentially like contract the conversion. In today's high speed business world, Staying ahead means using the smartest tools possible, including the powerful capabilities of artificial intelligence. Meet Turing Intelligence. Turing builds customizable AI systems designed to solve your mission-critical challenges, no matter your industry. From expert guidance to tailored projects, Turing helps top companies realize AI that's more capable, more adaptable, and more effective. With Turing, discover how AI can accelerate your business growth.

28:28To learn more, visit Turing.com slash sorcery, spelt S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. That's Turing.com slash sorcery. On the broader scale of the healthcare market, what are you seeing the impacts with more digitization of services and even for this? What do you envision your goal? I think we're still pretty far away. I feel like administrative work is still the number one spot to go deploy AI at. All the clinical decision-making pieces, there are companies going after that. I just think that there are actual regulatory things you have to solve for that. An AI is not a licensed clinician. It's not credentialed.

29:11Who ultimately bears risk for making the wrong diagnosis with a patient or missing an urgent diagnosis? And so we really prefer the administrative function. We don't try to do the clinical function. It's always like, hey, this is an urgent issue. Let's transfer you to the front desk. And so I think we're a little bit of a ways away from like doctor GPT and an AI being your doctor and like sitting in the clinical workflows. But ultimately, I think I don't even know if there's necessarily a cost saving aspect that's important yet. There's just a staffing constraint. And so when you talk to every practice, they're like, I literally cannot hire front desk people.

29:50I cannot hire call center people. There are not enough qualified folks who want to come in and work with us. And so you are augmenting the existing staff that they have. Talking about, okay, you just reached a new milestone. How do you think about growth within the company? What are the metrics that you've recently hit and how are you measuring them? I mean, we're doing like tens of thousands of conversations per day. I'd love to get to like millions of conversations per day. And that's just a function of how many clinics you can deploy at or how many, like, I guess, campaigns you can run on behalf of these healthcare clinics.

30:24And so that's really our next 12-month goal is just to scale to thousands of clinics live with us answering the phone when it comes inbound, us doing all their outbound campaigns. That's really how we, it's very clear how we measure success in that regard. If we are having a bunch of resolved conversations independently of a human being involved, then we're doing our job well. What's the pricing strategy? it like it's always in flux you're trying to like figure out how a clinic wants to pay we just got super undercut on pricing for a small group like they were already working with a uh not going to name the company and give them free pr but like they were working with them and they were just like yeah we'll do it for 200 bucks a month and and i started just spent that 20 minutes just asking their practice manager questions at that point it was clear we weren't going to compete for like 200 bucks a month and she's like yeah we get 2 000 calls per month and i'm like wow if you find someone who's going to do 8 ,000, they had four clinics.

31:21So 8 ,000 calls per month for like $800. Like you have the best deal on the market basically. Um, anyway, so we price depends on the type of practice either per clinic per month. We'll just handle everything. Um, it could be based on patient volume and just like a per patient per month fee to do all their member and get all their patient engagement. Uh, it could be usage based where they're like, Hey, I just want to pay if you're going to send a hundred thousand texts from you, like, let me just pay for that. And so So it really depends on the customer. And right now it's a bit more custom than we'd like it to be.

31:50How did you set up your tech stack and like where are the most costs from that? We have a pretty deep partnership with OpenAI. Like they, at their core, I guess I'm Sam right now, but we have a partnership with ourselves. No, we use OpenAI mostly for our like models. They are still by far best in class, like the smartest models in the market. we've tried gemini claude and anthropic are a little bit too slow for a phone call unfortunately um so we we've tried those are really like the three that you would choose from and llamas like we've tried it it's impossible like it does not do things properly yeah so anyway we use um mostly open ai and then for the voices we'll use either cartesia or 11 labs or a combo of the two.

32:36And then for like transcription, we'll use DeepGram. And so that's really like the vendors that we buy. And then everything else, like integrations into the EHRs and the practice management systems, it's all us. Like how you configure an agent to understand the right context at any point in time when you're saying like, hey, you take my insurance. Oh, by the way, I need to make an appointment for this thing. That's all like very custom orchestration under the hood. So we do that entire layer. We have a telephony partner who like handles, of course, the phone calls and texting. But like what goes into the call and how that works is all us.

33:11Because you're so ingrained and you're actually using the tools that are going to create AGI. How far do you think we are from AGI? We're pretty far. I think, you know, and I probably don't understand the definition. My definition of AGI is probably a lot different than just like, hey, this thing is like artificially generating its own intelligence. But for me, it's like they're still not smart and like they are really dumb without the right context. Right. And that's pretty obvious, but it's garbage in garbage out. And so I don't yet see how an agent that isn't like very explicitly customized for the work that you're doing goes to something that just like understands what to do anytime in the near future.

33:54What's the date? Like five years, seven years. Five years, seven years. Okay. At least my bar of like where I like my bar is I can just tell an agent your job is to be this medical receptionist. And here's a bunch of raw information about their practice and here's access to their systems. Like go figure it out. It won't do that right. Really? So that's AGI. What do you think about super intelligence? I don't know. That's above my pay grade. I'm not working on that or else I guess I'd have like a billion dollar year offer from Zuck right now. Fair, fair. Maybe you'll get fired from help patients.

34:35Yeah, maybe. And then go join, you know, Zuck and go build Llama to be good. We'll see. The legacy industry. How are you seeing this being adopted by legacy incumbents? Are you seeing any of that? Like, who are you competing against? Um, everyone has their own flair of it, I would say, right? Like historically, when you look at the EHR market and that's electronic health record market, that's Epic, Oracle Health, which used to be Cerner, you have Athena, you have ModMed, you have Dr. Crono, you've got eClinicalWorks, you've got like, there aren't that many, but there are, there is a long tail.

35:12Um, those companies were never designed for patient engagement, which is why it's so shitty when you try to go book with your provider today, or you get a notification that you have a bill due. it's because they were never designed to be patient first. They were designed to actually be billing first. It's not even provider first. Charting is a means to an end to get to like, how do I bill for this visit? Because they want to collect on the billing revenue essentially. And so look, I think, you know, Athena will have their own version of bidirectional texting. Maybe some of it's programmatic. I don't, I think they're pretty far from that.

35:45I think ModMed will have their own version of this, but I think we still have a two to three year headstart to like really get good and ingrain and go sell and be like best in class at patient engagement because they're really that last 10 % really does matter. It's not that it is easy to go do an outbound call. You can use any one of the 10 like agent builders today to go trigger an outbound call to a patient. It is really hard to do that and follow the workflow of a practice precisely so that you get to the right outcome for that clinic. How did you get so interested in all of this? When I joined Carbon, I was in this like weird spot where I'd quit my second startup.

36:21So we'd raise money for startup number two, had a big co-founder falling out. I quit. Was it also in healthcare? No, it was like prosumer SaaS. We were building, it doesn't matter that much. We were building like this natural command line for non-developer. It would have been a lot easier with ChadGPT today or like OpenAI, but imagine like an OpenAI experience, but it connected all your SaaS tools behind the hood and you could do things without leaving the experience that you were in. We raised a couple of million dollars for that. Co-founder falling out. I leave. And then I ended up getting recruited by Carbon because one of our angel investors at that company became my boss for four years.

36:57And so I knew when I joined Carbon, I wanted, this was like peak COVID. It was November, 2020. And I was like, I just want to do something meaningful and like healthcare is the most impactful thing that I could be working on at the time. And so I joined Carbon and, um, and then I just like fell in love with working on healthcare software, which not a lot of people say, I suppose, but I do actually genuinely love working on this stuff. That's great. What do you imagine the future of healthcare software to be in like the next year, five years? Um, I think in the next year, even like five years, it stays mostly the same from a like core platform perspective.

37:35Like the EHRs aren't going anywhere. Epic has a complete, basically like oligopoly over the entire space. ModMen and Athena are massive companies. Like I don't think anyone is unseating them in the next three to five years. But after that, who knows, like an AI first, an AI native EHR that does all the work we're doing, plus scribing, plus billing, like who knows where that goes at some point. You mentioned a bit about your team in the beginning, but how big is your team today and how is the composition? I guess as of the few offers that have accepted, we're like 15 or 16 people, about half engineering, few on sales, how to design, agent architects, which are actually like the core of what we do.

38:16So they write the system prompts for the agents to understand and do all this work. And then operations is like the other couple of folks. Are you hiring with this raise? Yes. What are you hiring for? Yeah. So we, Agent Architects is a big role for us. That's basically, Ashani's going to kill me when I like butcher it. She runs that, but like, essentially like it's a mix of prompt engineering with data science and like a natural, like almost like an NLP background, but someone who we, I consider them our forward deployed engineers because what Ashani is doing all day is like sitting down with their practice manager and saying, walk me through like this triaging flow.

38:51Like you said that you want to see people for, you know, hearing aid refitting. What does that actually mean? Like fundamentally when you want us to book the appointment. So that person is like very embedded within their practice and working with them. So we're hiring that role. If that's interesting to like new computer science grads and folks like that, that is a really good role for them. Implementation is more of your like technical project manager, someone who's going to then go like take that agent and deploy it to a hundred sites. That just requires a lot of logistical pieces. always hiring full stack engineers, always hiring sales.

39:27I am trying to hire my head of marketing who can hopefully like really vibe with me at my levels of like stupidity when it comes to doing marketing ideas. And yeah, those are, and then who else is solutions engineer in Mexico city. We're building a small team in Mexico city that's doing all the like practice integration. So those are really the big roles right now. Thinking more about the actual organization itself and building this as the founder, what was the biggest challenge that you've faced to date? In which part? Building the business. Oh, I mean, that's probably the easiest question. It's like agents are still not reliable.

40:06And that's kind of goes back to the whole, like when you think AGI is going to happen, like I'm seeing these things in production, trying to do real work. And that's always the hardest thing is getting them to follow the things that you tell them to do. You almost need this balance between a deterministic workflow, like go step one, step two, step three with these inputs and these inputs and these outputs and whatever to a mix between that and just this thing that can have full conversations, which is random. Sorcery is very honored to be sponsored by Brex. Yeah. Brex is all about spending smarter, moving faster and performance.

40:41Do me one of two things. I can give you a metal card. Okay. I don't know if you're a customer, but we'll make you one. Okay, we can switch from the other guys. You will. Okay. So instead of just giving you one today, I thought I would give you something that you like because you like health. I thought I'd give you a David bar. Oh, thank you. That's almost as good as a gold Brex card. It is gold. It is gold. Yes. And David is also a customer of Brex. Wow. Well, fudge brownie flavored bar. Did you hear the controversy with them recently though? No. apparently these things are not 150 calories. They're more.

41:20There's usually like a 20 % Delta for any nutritional. But they're like 220 calories or something like that. They're above it. Yeah. What are you going to do? You know, all the men eating these bars. They are good though. I just got into them recently. So thank you for the David bars. You're welcome. I got you two. Thank you. I got you three. Three, but I ate one. I was hungry. I just got here from the airport. I know. That's why I got you. Yeah. Okay, but more importantly, we're going to talk about peptides. Let's get into it. What do we start with? What's the starter pack for peptides? Well, so I do work with a longevity doctor.

41:56I want to shout him out because he is amazing. So if you go on Instagram, you can find Dr. Vass, V-A-S-S. Vassili is his full name or first name. I work with him. He's like my virtual longevity doctor. and he is who actually really got me into peptides. And I went through this whole hormone optimization, I would say like journey starting beginning of this year, so January of this year and went on TRT, which is testosterone injections. I had lower than I wanted, free T and total T. So that was like step one was we tried some natural stuff. It was like fine. Then I was like, just like, let me inject things.

42:35And so then we started injecting things. And TRT is life-changing, but we started to like experiment with some peptides. And so I think it really depends on what you want is kind of the first thing. And so for me, it was like muscle recovery, growth, like muscle growth, better sleeping, things like that. And so I started with CJC12. They all have these crazy, like crazy names, but CJC1295 infamorelin, which is, uh, it basically like signals to your brain to produce more, um, IGF-1 and like growth hormone essentially. So it helps with muscle growth and all that. Um, I'm on another cycle of that now.

43:13So you're supposed to cycle these things. I've tried, um, BP, oh my God, BPC 1295 for, uh, like repair. So I actually had a bunch of, um, I like tore something in my back or not tore, but like I injured, strained something in my back and I couldn't get it to go away with chiropractic and all this stuff. And so I just started doing BPC and it went away in like three weeks. There's TB 500. I have not done that yet, but a lot of people swear by that for similar, similarly like muscle recovery, essentially, and like ligament recovery. There is DSIP, which is deep sleep inducing peptides. You can take that and it helps like reset your natural circadian rhythm.

43:50I've always had bad sleep. So I did a cycle of that. It was like marginally better than just taking a lot of like melatonin and stuff. Did you measure it too? with like yeah I track everything so I have the aura ring I have the eight sleep and I know a lot of people get mad at me on Twitter for like tracking my sleep and saying oh don't drink before bed because like it fucks up your sleep but um I enjoy tracking those things and so I did track my sleep on DSIP and off it and slightly better deep sleep but like didn't notice anything materially different yeah those are like most of the ones that I've personally tried there's other things like Guku and some other like weird names for things that I haven't done.

44:27Uh, I'm in a group chat with a few bros who all do like peptides, TRT, all that stuff. And one guy does like nine of these a week. He's crazy. Um, yeah. And then there's one for, you mentioned this earlier, but like for getting tan and that's melanin. That one is from what I understand kind of unsafe. So maybe don't do that one, but it will put like more melanin in your body so that you become tanner naturally, basically. Why is it unsafe? People have had like weird allergic reactions to it. Oh, really? Yeah. They also got it probably from sketchy places and none of this stuff is regulated as part of the problem is you, there's a bunch of sites that sell peptides.

45:05I don't recommend just like Googling and buying the first one that comes up. I think there's ways to do some research to see purity and all that. But my doctor orders it through a compounding pharmacy that'll make it. Do you take these, like, do you inject them daily, weekly, monthly? How does it work? Some are daily, some are, um, like the deep sleep one and CJC are both nightly. You typically do five days on two days off, um, TRT, which is not a peptide. But again, I think every guy like over 30 should get tested for their hormone levels and then decide if they want to do it. It has downsides.

45:38Like it drops your fertility to zero. It can cause acne. Yeah. Cause your body stops making its own testosterone. Wow. Yeah. So I'm off it right now because we are going for a third kit. And so we'll see if that works. But I promised my wife, I was like six months in and I was like, look, like I'll go get tested. If I'm infertile, I'll go off TRT. And then I got tested and I went off TRT. And so, and I want to go back on it as soon as we do have the third kid. So, but every guy I think should be tested in a way, the pros versus the cons. I think peptides are kind of gray area. Like no one really knows long-term if they are safe.

46:17The general science says that they should be safe, but none of us will really know until they do some real studies. What do you think about all the weight loss peptides? Because now I think there's like three classes. Oh yes. That's the other one that I do. You do that? Yeah. Microdose, trisepatide. How much do you do? Like a tiny amount once a week. And it just like blunts all the food noise. And I think that those are like miracle drugs. What's a microdose? So the starter dose of any of them, whether it's like Ozempic or Wego, they're all kind of the same, but like Ozempic, Wego, Bezatbound is, or Manjaro is like two and a half milligrams, grams, I don't know, one of the two.

46:54It's like two and a half per week. And I do half of that. Half? Half the starter dose once a week. One of my friends was telling me about a newer one called like Regagutide or something like that. Yeah. It's like RGG or like GGG or something. Yeah. One of my best friends did it. It like was helpful, but then it raised his blood pressure and made his sleep kind of bad. So he went off of it. Is that Brian Johnson? Yeah. Brian's my best friend. Brian does way more stuff, although he's like obviously testing his body every single day. I actually love the work that he's doing. I know he's a master marketer at his core, but I think someone's got to experiment with everything.

47:35I think it's fascinating. Yeah. And I think he looks good. A lot of people don't like the way he looks, but I think he looks great. I was like. He looks super healthy. Were you at Hereticon? No, I never get invited. I like had just seen him for the first time at Hereticon. And like, this was before he started dressing differently. He just had started dressing differently. And now he dresses like, you know. Just like 20. 18 year old. Yeah. But it's fine. Whatever. Yeah. But I saw him there and I was like, oh, he doesn't look that bad. No. People are kind of crazy. Yeah. I think they're mean on the internet.

48:07They're mean. It's also just like an easy thing to look at, but he's not. No, I think he looks great. Like he's, he's in great shape. He looks healthy. Like his whole like facial complexion looks good and like jaw structure, all that stuff. I mean, I know he's done, from my understanding, he's done some like fillers and things like that, but generally like hard to achieve that look without doing a lot of longevity stuff to your body. What else? Are there any other crazy ones? We could talk about like real steroids, but I don't have any experience with those. Or I'd be much bigger right now. I mean, yeah, they are.

48:41What happens with human, like, what is it? HGH? Yeah, human growth hormone. When people get like the puffy. Yeah. Is that a real thing? It makes your organs bigger? I don't know. You don't know? No. Oh, there is one other peptide. If I get this wrong, the internet's going to make fun of me. But like they're HIV positive, I think. And like it, when they're going through treatments and stuff, it helps reduce fat around the, like fat around your organs basically. And that one is regulated by, hold on, I got to get the name of this or it's going to bother me. Okay. Tessamorelin. That's it. So, um, Tessamorelin is a peptide that is particularly effective at reducing visceral fat.

49:20And that's the fat that like surrounds the, um, the organs basically. And so, and originally, yeah. So tessamorelin was originally used for patients who were going through HIV treatments and they were like basically putting on visceral fat from the treatments. And so, but you can use it as a longevity drug as well. Fascinating. And that one is like FDA approved. Wow. If you have, if you are going through those treatments and most of us, I've done that one too. Do you think that like everyone's going to have to start taking these? I think they're safer than probably most pharmaceuticals. And so it's really a question of like, what do you want to put in your body if you had to choose?

49:55I don't think anyone needs to necessarily choose to do any of this stuff, but I don't know if you're like optimizing for, I guess, longevity and like fitness and things like that. I know so many people who are like on peptides at this point. Yeah. I just, me and my friends over the weekend, we were talking about like just the state of American health and how it just, no matter what the bar is set at a really bad place because of the food system, we can get into microplastics and everything, but the food system is actually so bad that one of my friends, when she moved here, she gained like 50 pounds because just of the food.

50:33From where? Where did she move from? China. Oh, wow. Yeah. Another friend moved from, I think like Mexico and actually gained weight when they moved here too. Yeah. Our food system is completely fucked up. Like we're all just eating processed foods all day. I don't know if it's all the microplastics. I just think generally like food lobbies have caused our food system to just be horrendous. And so you just don't know what you're eating when you put it in your body. And it messes up your hormones, which is why we get to the weed and the peptides. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's why the GLP ones, like the ones that everyone knows about, which are, you know, your ozempics of the world are so popular is because we have this obesity problem.

51:13And it's like the one thing that offsets the food system. And so, yeah, I think generally if our food system was better and people weren't overweight and like struggle and I think you struggle to lose weight because it's really hard to eat clean. Really hard. Yeah. It's really hard. I don't I don't think people should be judged for taking it either. I think there's a lot of like stigma around it. and people are like, you cheated at losing weight. And it's like, I don't see how it's different than taking creatine to put on, you know, water weight and build some mass and like taking other, it's just another supplement.

51:42Yeah. I've had many friends, like, especially women, like for women, hormones are just like a beast. Like it is horrible. Um, but they, they do this and then they see effects like almost immediately. And they're like, why didn't I take this sooner? Like I've been busting my ass at the gym for like five years and I haven't lost any weight. But then they do this. It regulates their hormones. It gets everything in place. That was me on TRT. Like I think I've had a hormonal imbalance for years. Like if you, I can show you photos of me like in my twenties, but I was like pudgy, super round face. I couldn't lose or gain any weight.

52:17I couldn't lose weight if I wanted to. I couldn't put on muscle. And like, I finally, as I hit like late twenties and started to eat better and track macros and do all those things. I like finally dropped a lot of the puffy, like hormonal related weight. And then it wasn't until I was 32 and like went on TRT that I was like, Oh my God, is this what it's like to go to the gym and put on muscle? And I didn't take an absurd amount. I took like literally a clinical dose. And, um, it was within three months I started to actually see definition for the first time. That's incredible. And I was weightlifting for years, like CrossFit, weightlifting.

52:49My diet wasn't always like locked in, but I don't think it needs to be completely locked in to also see benefits and I just wasn't seeing any. Okay. What device do you think that Johnny Ive and Sam Altman will announce? I think it's going to be a pair of glasses. I think like, that's the only form function that my, again, like Johnny genuinely like understands the future, I think of God, I'm like going into acting mode, but like he, uh, he genuinely understands the, um, like hardware. And so there may be something crazy that I'm just like not aware is even possible to do. But I think the most obvious one is like some form of glasses that have AI built in.

53:32Okay. Okay. Did you want to talk about Sesh at all? Sure. Now that we have some air time? Do you want to try one before we leave? Try a nicotine pouch? Yeah. No. No? No way. It is also 8.30 PM. I've never done one before. Sesh is a HVC portfolio company that I particularly enjoy partaking in. This is not paid endorsement. This is not paid, although they send us a lot of Sesh, so it's great. And the whole office is addicted to Sesh. They're sending us a fridge to put our Sesh's in to chill the pouches. Is that a better experience if you chill them? I haven't tried it yet. That sounds good. There's mango.

54:11Very great flavor if you're craving some fruitiness. I have wintergreen good it kind of likes a gum replacement and then mint again another like it's kind of like having a mint in your mouth and so and I find I do the small like the lowest dose they make is four milligrams that's all I do probably like two times a day and it really helps you lock in wow it's a weird habit I never I never really touched nicotine in my life until a bunch of engineers joined our team interesting they were all addicted I was like oh they're productive so they must be doing something right. You didn't get it from the gym.

54:47You got it from engineers. No, literally like software engineers. Okay. Wow. Yeah. Well, Alex Cohen, it was lovely to have you on today. Thank you so much. I'm glad we got to do this finally. Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.bc, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. subscribe to sorcery today and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on youtube spotify apple or wherever you listen link in description to sign up

From the publisher

*WARNING* Alex Cohen has one of the wildest founder journeys in tech. Fired by over 11 companies—including Elon Musk’s X, Meta, CrowdStrike, and even Wendy’s—he’s now the founder and CEO of Hello Patient, an AI platform transforming how healthcare practices engage with patients.


In this conversation, Alex and Molly O’Shea dive into his underdog story, the viral parody videos that turned heads across the Valley, his 220k+ X following, why storytelling is the ultimate founder superpower, and yes, shares his latest experiments with peptides... Which all leads to Alex announcing Hello Patient’s $22.5M Series A led by Scale Venture Partners, with continued support from 8VC, Bling Capital, Max Ventures, and Remus Capital. Building the future of conversational AI in healthcare.


Hello Patient builds conversational AI agents that handle patient-facing workflows across phone, text, and web chat. Instead of patients waiting on hold, missing appointments, or navigating clunky portals, Hello Patient automates scheduling, reminders, follow-ups, and inbound calls. The system is already deployed across urgent care, ENT, behavioral health, med spas, and primary care, giving clinics 24/7 coverage while reducing missed calls and boosting patient satisfaction. With staffing shortages across the healthcare industry, Hello Patient steps in as the digital front desk—scalable, HIPAA-compliant, and deeply integrated with practice management systems.


Highlights

• The Underdog Story: Alex was fired 11 times before founding Hello Patient, a history that fuels his authenticity and self-deprecating humor.

• Parody as Marketing: Launch videos parodying Humane and Sam Altman/Jony Ive weren’t gimmicks—they were strategic brand moments that drove massive inbound traction.

• Fundraising Success: Hello Patient raised a $22.5M Series A led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from 8VC, Bling Capital, Max Ventures, and others.

• Healthcare AI Impact: Hello Patient powers omnichannel patient engagement—calls, texts, and chatbots—for urgent care, ENT, mental health, med spas, and more, solving staffing shortages and missed appointments.

• The X Factor: With 220k+ followers, Alex’s shitposting persona is more than comedy—it’s storytelling that gives him investor access, customer inbound, and cultural relevance


1. Alex Cohen: https://x.com/anothercohen

2. Molly O’Shea: ⁠https://x.com/MollySOShea⁠

3. Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryvc⁠


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Chapters:

(00:00) Underdog Story

(01:40) Getting Fired 11 Times

(02:38) Creating the Launch Video Parody

(03:32) Recreating Sam Altman's Look

(06:01) Reviewing Past Company Firings

(10:41) Transition from Carbon Health to Hello Patient

(13:02) Series A Fundraising Process

(14:35) Storytelling, Social Media & Fundraising

(30:03) Company Growth & Metrics

(31:55) Technical Stack & AI Partnerships

(38:08) Team and Hiring

(41:53) Deep Dive into Peptides

(46:23) Discussion on Weight Loss Peptides

(50:36) American Food System & Health

(53:03) Predictions on Jony Ive & Sam Altman's Device

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