Happy Bday to Me!

Doing what I love to do

Staying involved in business while being in medicine is not a bad thing. Its kind of like playing poker, you read people make moves, take risks and build a reputation as a certain kind of player.

Today, I realized how fascinating business can be and how vital it is to have a great reputation. Presented a deal to one of our existing investors today who proceeded to spend the meeting chastising us about how lousy a deal it was that we were bidding for, how we had botched our approach and how defocused we are to even pursue such a deal. He even threatened to report to his superiors that we were not doing our jobs. After the meeting, I had a serious conversation with our boss about abandoning this deal for these reasons.

Upon reporting this to our team members in Singapore, I found out that the investor we met with was not credible, tended to “panic” and that we should proceed with our current approach. They further reassured us of a very simple idea, pursuing a large business opportunity ($$$) should never be abandoned at the first sight of trouble.

I guess its true what they say, “it takes (at least) two to tell the truth”. In this case, I think I side with the viewpoint of our teammates whose incentives are aligned with ours and whose reputation is stronger. Anyway, I guess these kind of interesting arguments and counterarguments, the poker strategies and analyses are very interesting to me. Life would be pretty good if I could spend some of my time doing this while helping the sick or the poor. For instance specializing in some branch of medicine (ie Internal Med, Infectious disease) and being established in that field as a practitioner, then also sitting on the boards of some exciting life science technology companies (as a venture partner) which would allow me to travel between China, US, Japan and also managing a clinic/microfinance operation in Africa, Latin America or China.