Munjal Shah

Munjal Shah is the CEO and co-founder of Hippocratic AI, an innovative health care startup leveraging breakthrough large language model technology to provide nondiagnostic medical care in areas such as chronic care nursing, dietitian services, and patient navigation.

Prior to Hippocratic AI, Shah founded and ran several machine learning and computer vision startups. He co-founded the artificial intelligence-based e-commerce company like.com, which was acquired by Google, as well as Andale, a provider of software to online merchants on platforms such as eBay and Amazon, which was ultimately acquired by Alibaba. An angel investor with more than 42 investments in startups, Shah also invested in 23 early-stage venture funds.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of California San Diego, where his senior thesis focused on the use of AI in the design of new therapeutics, and a master’s in computer science with an emphasis on AI and machine learning from Stanford University.

How do you bring ideas to life?

I think two of the most important things when it comes to bringing an idea to life are what I call generative thinking and adaptive thinking.

Generative thinking involves coming up with a way of solving a customer problem that nobody’s thought of before. That’s how you create a really interesting new startup. Take the iPhone. You couldn’t have surveyed your way to the iPhone. People thought they needed a keyboard and a mouse.

Adaptive thinking is when you iterate, get customer feedback, and adjust the product, fix it, and fix it again. A lot of people just do one or the other, but I believe if you combine adaptive thinking and generative thinking, you’re able to come up with a radically new idea nobody’s thought of and then fine-tune it. If you only do generative ideas, you may end up with something that was right in concept, but nobody liked using the final product. And if you only stick to adaptive thinking, you don’t get big, new, radical ideas.

What’s one trend that excites you?

Generative AI. I have never seen technology that’s made this much of a jump in capabilities. In the not-so-distant past, you could think of general AI as having something like an IQ of 60, just limited chatbots and interactive voice response systems. You could make it smart, maybe with an IQ of 130, but only in these specific areas you trained it in. But now we have a general IQ of 130 AI for almost everything. And I think that that is something we’ve never had before. That has tremendous potential to impact society in a positive, real way.

I’ve only seen three trends of something this big over my working lifetime: the internet, the mobile phone and smartphone, and now generative AI. These breakthroughs are like forest fires. Normally, when you try to create a company, it’s so hard to find a space in the forest where you can get sunlight that the big trees haven’t taken up. But when one of these big megatrends comes, it burns all the big trees. And your ability to create a new company is so much faster and so much easier.

What is one habit that helps you be productive?

You have to carve out a piece of your day to initiate rather than react. All day long, you’re answering Slacks, you’re answering emails, you’re texting back to people, you’re just constantly reacting. As a founder CEO, there are so many things coming at you and sometimes you can’t get started on things you know need to happen, but haven’t started yet. There needs to be a part of your day that you’re just proactive and you’re not reactive, so that the things you think are a priority are happening, rather than having things everybody else thinks are a priority happening.

That’s the key to being really productive, because otherwise your life gets set by somebody else’s agenda, and you’ll get done what they wanted you to get done, not what you thought needed to get done.

What advice would you give your younger self?

You can have both humility and boldness at the same time. There’s a false premise that to be bold, you have to have such a high belief in yourself. Then there’s also this view that we have to be humble all the time. But the problem with being humble all the time is it’s hard to then do something that everybody else thought was crazy, to step out from the crowd. It usually takes a belief in self that’s very high to step out from the crowd.

Unfortunately, boldness is usually accompanied by a lack of humility, and I think over the years you realize you can do both.

Tell us something you believe almost nobody agrees with you on?

All human emotions have utility, even the ones people don’t like. I think they all exist for a reason and they’re in the repertoire of the human condition because all of them provide some insight and some utility, even sometimes in a business setting. We don’t tend to say that jealousy has value, but jealousy does have value. It absolutely does. It motivates a subset of people in a subgroup of situations to do more, to strive to be more in their lives.
Emotional outpourings can be really efficient. I find sometimes people bottle things up and they just don’t say what’s bothering them, then it has to come out all at once. I look at every single emotion. There’s not one that I say, “Well, we should never have that one or this one. We should only have these emotions.”

I think all of them serve a purpose and utility and help in some way. Not always in that moment, but long term, they can really help the group move forward, the team move forward, and that person move forward.

What is the one thing you repeatedly do and recommend everyone else do?

I once took a comedy class at Second City. I spent about six weeks doing this improv class, and I would say that everybody should try to, at some point, learn something like that. I didn’t realize this, but comedy is a learned skill, and a lot of people think it’s just something that you either get or you don’t.

Utilizing humor in your daily life makes everything easy. Even delivering a tough message to somebody with a little bit of humor can just make it go down so much easier, or delivering a tough message to the team. If people laugh in a meeting, the mood of the meeting and the energy of the meeting will change. People’s minds open up to new ideas and new directions.. I try to do it in almost every meeting. I just try to make a joke somewhere about something that will make everybody laugh. If I can’t think of something, I’ll make a joke a my own expense just to lighten the mood.

When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do?

I try to think creatively in times of stress. I think most people can’t be truly creative under duress. Most people, the more stressed they get, the less creative they get. They just hire more people or work longer. Too many people just grind it out.

One of the things I love to do when I get under duress in a situation is actually try to get more creative. I ask, “Is there a better way to solve this so that we can get it done in the time frame? Or is there a part of this requirement of what we’re trying to get done that just doesn’t need to be done? Is there a radically new way to solve the problem?”

What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business or advance in your career?

Be as transparent as you can, especially with the people who are working directly with you. In the case of a CEO, that’s your board of directors. The more transparent you are, the more trust you will build.

When things don’t go well, which they invariably don’t all the time, then it’s that transparency that helps people still trust and believe in you, and that trust and belief is what compounds over your career. Success can compound, but success does not compound as well as, frankly, trust can compound.

What is one business idea you’re willing to give away to our readers?

Some businesses have a low barrier to entry and others have a high barrier to entry, and they either have low margins or high margins. Usually a low barrier to entry means lower margins. But when a platform shift happens, like the current shift in AI, there’s a low barrier to entry for what will eventually be a high-margin business.

When the iPhone came out, all of a sudden you could create a new weather app out of nowhere and get a whole bunch of traction. There’s a moment in time when these things happen, when all of a sudden things become very easy to start something new and look for those trends. Right now we are in one of these platform shifts with generative AI. It is probably the best time in a decade or two to start a new company.

What is one piece of software that helps you be productive? How do you use it?

A perfectly up-to-date calendar. I plan out everything, and set reminders to be mindful of my commitments.

Do you have a favorite book or podcast you’ve gotten a ton of value from and why?

I love biographies. They’re a road map of how other people live their lives, and I usually listen to them while I run or bike. It’s amazing how you kind of are listening to somebody else navigate their life. I read Andre Agassi’s biography recently and I was just shocked by it because he apparently hated tennis.

Key learnings

• The generative AI boom is a technological shift on par with the internet and the smartphone.
• Balancing generative thinking and adaptive thinking is crucial for building products that solve new problems and are fine-tuned for consumer preferences.
• Cultivating a creative mindset and emotional transparency helps teams improve communication and solve problems under duress.