How Coding Early in Life Can Lead to Start Up Success Later

Jun 03, 2016, 10:00 AM

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Today’s guest is Sharib Khan. Sharib is the Co-founder and CEO of TrialX, the patient connection company and Applied Informatics an award winning Healthcare Information Technology solutions company. Built in 2008 as one of the first apps on the Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault platforms, to automatically match patients to clinical trials using personal health records, TrialX is today a leading clinical research solutions company. TrialX's mission is to connect patients to research and its products are now used in world-famous medical institutions such as The Cleveland Clinic, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center/Harvard Medical School, University of Pennsylvania, New York Presbyterian Hospital and the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation. TrialX has won several awards including the NCI's best Cancer Consumer Application Development challenge in 2011/2012. Sharib is also the Co-founder and CEO at Applied Informatics, specializing in designing and developing world-class healthcare information technology solutions. He previously co-founded one of the largest cooking recipes websites, iFood.tv, which is now a new media powerhouse on Roku and other Smart TVs with more than 300 channels under Future Today Inc. In between these endeavors he worked as a Biomedical Informatics Researcher at Columbia University working on several federally funded research projects, include the development of a patient-centric EHR, a health promotion portal built on web 2.0 technologies and conducting an IT readiness assessment for the Dept. of Health, New York City, which initiated the Primary Care Information Project to support the roll-out of EHRs in city clinics. He learned how to program when in boarding school in the Himalayas and then followed his passion, to do "awesome things" in technology after finishing medical school in Delhi. He can often be spotted as the "headstand guy", doing his favorite yoga poses somewhere. Listen to the episode as Sharib also shares:

How many patients TrialX has helped since launching in 2008
When he learned to code
How coding has opened doors for him
How he dealt with career pressure when he made his choices
His early path with iFood, and other projects
How he spent 2 years with this side hustle before he went full time
How long it took to start to see some success with iFood, and why he was patient
Why a Google Hack-a-thon brought an idea to fruition
How the Google Health platform was instrumental in the early days
How he got Microsoft to carry his app
What allowed him to sign up hospital and healthcare partners for the app
Why it is important to have an internal champion within a company
Why you have to nurture your relationships within a company in order to partner
How they determined their pricing for the service
How he was able to go from F1 to H1 Visa and was able to work in a start-up
Their revenue currently and how it supports a team of more than 30
Ways he pushes his team to continue to be innovative

Resources and Links: ◦America walks study http://trialx.com/americawalksstudy/ ◦http://trialx.dcom/ ◦http://curetalks.com