At the November Healthcare Entrepreneur Meetup hosted by Atlanta Ventures, A.T. Gimbel interviewed three fascinating founders:
The morning was filled with lots of laughter and sharing lessons learned. These events are part of an ongoing series of talks about Healthcare in Atlanta, with the goal to make Atlanta the premier place to start and grow a HealthIT business.
Check out the video recap and synopsis of the Meetup below:
The Meetup kicked off with A.T., asking how they each ended up in the healthcare space. Oftentimes a company starts after a founder experiences a problem firsthand. This was the case with both Rachel McCrickard and Ashish Advanti. Rachel had personally experienced how difficult it was to get licensed after school and Ashish was working as a pharmacist, noticed the problems, and couldn’t help but try to solve them. In Tee’s case, his friend was experiencing the problem and he saw there was a big opportunity in rural areas pertaining to healthcare, hence the creation of CCI.
In healthcare you can affect people’s lives. Everyone in here has a chance to affect people’s lives.
-Tee Faircloth
One big challenge founders have always faced is taking their idea from “I’m going to solve this problem” to “I’m solving this problem”. A common denominator in the morning discussion was that it’s necessary to understand the complexities of the healthcare system while also deeply understanding your customer.
I would have gone and interviewed ten times more people before I even wrote a single line of code.
- Ashish Advani
Tee discussed two types of customers, the people on the ground using the product and the person who can make the decision to adopt the product. In healthcare, administrators want to see ROI, so it’s important to interview the decision makers and not just the people using your product. Timing also matters when making your product an actuality.
Timing was just so good for us because of the legislation. We are just right there at the epicenter, and we are making this process way easier.
-Rachel McCrickard, LMFT
Navigating the funding process and making decisions on how to fund is also something an entrepreneur wants clarity on. There are many different paths to reach success and not one right answer. In Ashish’s case, he received a grant. He and his team however had to show a lot more research and evidence that their product would work before a check was cut. The reality is, reaching that point takes lots of work.
It was a six year overnight success!
Rachel’s company, Motivo, has only been growing exponentially the last two months. “Having never done this before, I had to learn how to tell the billion dollar story of Motivo. I had to ask, ‘How big can this market get and what lateral markets are there?’” Founders will learn tons on their first raise and she encouraged entrepreneurs to persevere even if it's tough.
It looks really tied together at the end, but the process is not easy.
- Rachel McCrickard, LMFT
Tee looked at how to de risk as much as possible.
"When it comes to understanding the outside influences of your business, you've got to know it backwards, forwards, sideways. You have to understand it because, it's how to relate that to a VC and allow them your depth of knowledge because you're gonna have more depth of knowledge than your investor. If you're gonna take outside money and you don't want somebody else taking over your business, you better know your business very well."
- Tee Faircloth
If you’re considering any kind of career as an entrepreneur in the healthcare space, Ashish says, “The best time was 10 years ago, but the second best time is today! If anyone is sitting on ‘that idea’, put it out there!” One great question to ask yourself is:
How would you feel if anyone else created your idea? That’s a good indicator of whether or not you should go for it.
When it comes to the HealthIT space in Atlanta, Atlanta Tech Village and the ATDC are some amazing places to start. Tee also challenged founders to think about the motivation behind starting a company. “If you want to figure out a way to make money really easily, don’t do healthcare, it's really, really, really hard. But if you actually want to make a dent in the world and change people's lives, you know it's worth it every day.”
Catch the next Atlanta Healthcare Entrepreneur Meetup in January 2020!
© 2026 Atlanta Ventures
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