#59 Keith Grimes' freedom
How a clinician became an AI expert
Hello,
I am taking a very long vacation this summer to spend it volunteering in South Africa. For the first two weeks, I will be supporting an orphanage for baby rhinos. During the second half of my trip, I will be at Kruger National Park assisting wildlife conservation specialists.
If you want to follow my volunteering journey, feel free to subscribe to my Instagram account, where I will share updates when the internet connection allows.
In preparation for this trip, I have secured interviews with very interesting people who will keep you inspired while I take a break from writing. These interviews are scheduled in advance, and I will resume writing at the end of August.
Deconstructing freedom: Keith Grimes
🤩 About Keith Grimes: I am a UK based General Practitioner and founder of Curistica, a boutique innovation consultancy that offers fractional Chief Medical/Product/Clinical Safety Officer services to companies working in Healthtech.
I lead a team of 4 associates, and we’re currently working with a number of companies including several building generative AI features and products, as well as D2C diagnostics, mental health and neurodiversity. I also deliver talks and workshops on Generative AI and Prompt Engineering, including integrated design sprints and ‘micro-hack’ events.
🗽 Freedom dimensions: As I move from a sole practitioner model to a team I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my values, as it is important that I can assemble a group of colleagues that operate to the same principles. Within that group, flexibility of location and work hours is key.
⚡️Trigger: The trigger was leaving Babylon at the end of 2022. As the company faced difficulty in raising funds for their US growth, the product work I led and loved came to an end. I faced a decision: do I stay on in a clinical role, or do I step away and pursue new challenges. I knew I wanted to continue to work in Clinical Product, but I had also led the internal clinical subject matter expert team for nearly 3 years, and had a strong belief that a well directed and supported group of hybrid practitioners could accelerate the development of safe, effective, and innovative healthtech. I took a deep breath and chose to leave so I could test this hypothesis!
🚀 Start: When I first left I hit the ground running, meeting with all of my contacts and looking at what opportunities might be out there. This was exhausting and didn’t give me the time I needed to calmly reflect on where I had come from and where I wanted to go. In particular, I wanted to establish my ‘Why’: the reason that I do what I do. This was a response to inspiration from Simon Sinek and his talks and books. My wife and I booked a holiday in South Africa, where I was able to push the ideas of work aside and just enjoy a wonderful break. On my return, all the pieces fell quickly into place.
🔀 Pivot: It wasn’t so much a wrong direction, more of a realisation that working alone would always limit the scope of my practice, and therefore my impact. To achieve a change, I needed support from someone who was more deliberate and detail-orientated regarding planning and delivery. This led me to my colleague and former Babylon workmate Chloe Le Baigue. Between us, we started to envision what Curistica could be.
💰 Finance: When I left Babylon I had a 6 month salary equivalent cushion which allowed me time to plan my first steps. In addition, I was able to do locum work as a GP to help top up this fund. I was fortunate to have a large network of people who knew me and my capabilities which led to some early contracts, and that gave me the initial momentum I needed.
🏆 Why it worked: I think the things that I did well, first of all, was make sure that I maintained my network. I consider myself fairly good at networking, and I'd done a lot of it before joining my previous company. While I was at Babylon, I poured all my energies into that company when I was there, but as things started to wind down, I re-engaged the world. So I think the first thing that I did well was really, really go for keeping in touch with people, being clear about what I was doing, celebrating the successes I was having, and making sure that the posts I put fit with a kind of narrative, a sort of authentic narrative about what I was trying to do.
Second thing I think that I did well was spend a lot of time thinking about why I was doing what I did. I'm a big fan of Simon Sinek and his work on the Golden Circle, and starting with the why. So I spent a good bit of time getting those basics in place, my why, my mission, my vision, my values, which paid off well, because as I started to think about growing my business from beyond just me to including others, I realized that I needed to adapt this to something that wasn't overfitted to me, as in I described a mission, vision, and values that would allow other people to come in with this as well.
The third good thing that I did was that I brought on, reasonably early on, an associate called Chloe, who I'd worked with at Babylon. She provided a lot of the things that I needed, which was a focus on delivery and structure and understanding what I should say yes and no to.
Then the final thing that worked really well was I invested in a really excellent marketing person called Emily Burt. She knew me a little bit from Babylon, but we had some fantastic open conversations. So I described what I wanted to do, and she was very skillfully able to extract that and start to put together an idea about the brand and how we described what we did that would be much more inclusive to those around us, and that was really valuable.
All these things started to convert Curistica from being just a wrapper for myself to being something that represented more and other people could come behind.
📌 Learnings: In terms of the things I could have done differently, I might have saved you some more of that initial revenue to develop the business a little bit earlier, although, I don't know, that would have taken a degree of prescience that I don't think I had. I think I would have been a bit more discerning about the number of contacts that I'd had, particularly for advisory roles, because they tie you up quite a lot. I'm still really happy with the things that I had, and I remain very, very open to people contacting me, and I just say yes to a lot of things.
Bringing Chloe on has really helped me be a little bit more careful with my time and planning and so on. That all said, these conversations do often lead to something else, so it's a bit of a balance, but I think I could have been a bit more careful, so maybe a little bit more sort of forethought or planning about some of these advisory roles and other connections that aren't deliberately related to the work that I'm trying to do.
🤔 Key advice: I would say think, definitely, definitely spend a good bit of time thinking about your why. If you haven't seen it, see Simon Sinek's TED Talk on the Golden Circle, and it may seem like a rather abstract thing, but understanding truly what it is that drives you and why it is you do what you do, and then allow that then to sort of pour into, you know, you're able to describe it to people, and then that will then flow into how you do what you do, and then what exactly it is that you offer.
☕️ Are you open for my readers to reach out for a coffee chat? Given what I've said beforehand, I want to be careful about committing too often, but truthfully I do love meeting people, so the answer is yes, I'll sort out the realities of it later! My LinkedIn