The person healthtech startups keep failing to hire
Most healthtech and life-sciences startups are built from three kinds of people. There is a fourth kind they need and rarely look for.
Walk into a diagnostics software company, a genomics services startup or a lab automation business and you will find the same three groups. Scientists and clinicians who understand the problem. Engineers who build the product. Business generalists who run sales, operations and customer success. Each group is good at its job. The trouble is what happens at the boundaries between them.
Where it breaks
A lab manager calls customer success and asks why the quality control values are drifting after the last update, or how the platform handles sample rejection criteria, or why a report that used to take two hours now takes four. The customer success associate, who has a business degree and a good manner, writes it down and escalates it. The scientist who could answer is in a meeting and does not want to be on customer calls anyway. Two days pass. The lab manager, who has a queue of patients and a pathologist asking questions, stops trusting the product a little.
Multiply that by every customer and you have the reason healthtech companies churn accounts they should never have lost. The problem was not the product. It was that nobody on the customer side of the company could hold the conversation.
The fourth person
The missing hire is someone who has worked in a lab and has also worked a customer queue. Not a scientist. Not a salesperson. Someone who knows what a haemolysed sample is and what a handover note should contain. Who can triage a technical question well enough to answer half of them on the spot, escalate the other half with the right detail attached, and translate the answer back into the lab's language.
This person is rare, and the reason is structural. People with a biotechnology or life-sciences degree mostly go into laboratories, research or a master's programme. People who end up in operations and customer success mostly come from commerce and management backgrounds and have never run an analyser. The two career paths do not cross, so the person who has done both barely exists at the junior level, and companies do not write job descriptions for someone they have never met.
What the seat looks like
In practice it is customer success, implementation or operations, with a domain edge. Onboarding written in the lab's own vocabulary rather than the product's. First-line support that can tell a QC question from a user error before escalating either. Feedback to the product team that says what the lab actually meant, not what the ticket said. At an earlier-stage company it is broader: the first generalist a science-led founder hires to own customers, vendors and the operational loose ends while they build.
Where I fit, and where I don't
I am early in my career, so I will be plain about it. I have a BSc in Biotechnology and Genetics. I spent four months as a junior lab technician running around 150 samples a day on a biochemistry analyser and handling complete blood count processing and QA on a haematology analyser. This year I have worked in operations, resolving around a hundred customer tickets a day with an audited quality score that has held at 100%. Before that I sold face to face in retail and brand campaigns.
I do not write software and I am not a research scientist. What I have is the combination: I have been the person receiving the sample, and I have been the person on the phone closing the ticket. I am looking for the seat described above, at a healthtech, diagnostics or life-sciences company in Bengaluru, and I would like to hear from founders who recognise the gap.
If that is you, my email is at the bottom of the page. I answer it myself.
Written by Mohammed Roshan, who has worked in operations at Assurant and on the bench at a diagnostics lab. Email or LinkedIn.
If this is the kind of thinking your team needs, the CV is one page.