I’ve spent more than a decade working with healthcare startups — as a consultant, investor, and advisor. Over time, I started seeing the same pattern again and again.
Building a startup requires climbing a series of hurdles. You climb one mountain, finally reach the top and then you realize that you’ve actually reached a plateau, and there’s a whole mountain range ahead of you. Each inflection point brings new questions and new decisions to make.
In those moments, there’s barely time to think. Your team is growing, your product needs iteration, investors want updates, customers need support — and the bigger strategic questions about what’s next get moved to the bottom of the to-do list.
Many of these questions have to do with the next horizon - Where is the best place to focus? There are new business models to explore, new customer types to pursue, new products to develop. Especially in today’s market, things move so quickly that you might have been focused on a certain direction during a fund raise and then the round finally closes 6 months later and you need to reevaluate your priorities by then.
As a CEO, your days are busy, spent building and growing the company. It’s at night, when the world finally quiets down, in what I call CEO pajama time, when you finally get the space to think and tackle the big questions. Which business model should we pursue? Which new products or services should we launch? Which customer segment is worth doubling down on? Usually working with ChatGPT, you’re cobbling together data and perspectives to try to get enough meat around the bones to gain conviction on which direction to go in.
I’ve been a consultant for over a decade, first at McKinsey and Company, where I led their work on Digital Health and then at Rock Health, where I built and led their consulting practice. In that time, I’ve helped hundreds of companies on commercial strategy, GTM and innovation. When I was at McKinsey I was part of several groups who attempted to adapt McKinsey’s way of working to suit startups. It was difficult to get McKinsey’s model to fit a startup’s needs. At Rock Health, we were regularly approached by startups looking for support, but our advisory business was focused on enterprise clients. The need for a customized tailor support option for startups was something I’ve been aware of for a long time. Startups don’t need the same things as big companies, but they do need support, especially at inflection points. A structured way to articulate the right question, define an approach to build conviction, gather the data to test and validate, and translate that into the next action step. That support historically was data rich and labor intensive, making it hard to fit into the price point and pace of startup reality.
With the rapid advent of AI, I realized that finally this was possible. We could flip the script, rather than a pyramid, like consulting is, with a senior person at the top and a team of analysts underneath, we could have a core engine that powers our data and analysis (with a human in the loop, vetted approach) enabling experienced advisors to support startups in a leaner way. And that’s how Aytza was born. We’re advisors who also do the grunt work, designed from the bottom up (or inside out) for startups needs.
Aytza means “guidance” in Hebrew. That’s what this is about — helping founders make the big calls that shape the future of their business. Not more opinions, not thud factor decks. A clear way to think through the problem, validate it with data, and act on it.
Healthcare founders will always face the next mountain. Aytza can help make navigating those inflection points faster, smarter, and a little less lonely.
If you’re climbing that next mountain, we’d love to help you on the way.
