How Insight Health used a free AI scribe to turn EHR companies from competitors into a distribution channel | Jaimal Soni

**Jaimal Soni** (0:00)
We did the first ever fully autonomous patient interaction powered entirely by AI.

**Brett** (0:08)
Welcome back to another episode of Builders. As always, this show is brought to you by frontlines.io, Silicon Valley's leading B2B podcast production studio. If you're bringing technology to market and want to learn from your peers, we have a library of more than 1200 interviews with venture-backed founders and marketers where they talk all things go to market. Of course, if you want to launch your own podcast, we offer podcasts as a service to more than 80 tech startups. The idea there is very simple. You show up and host and we do everything else. Now with all that said, let's jump into today's episode.
Our guest today is Jaimal Soni, CEO and co-founder of Insight Health. Jaimal, welcome to the show.

**Jaimal Soni** (0:47)
Yeah, appreciate you having me. Nice to meet you, bud.

**Brett** (0:49)
Of course, looking forward to the conversation. So I see that you spent seven years at Segment. I'm sure that was a ride. What did you learn from your time there? Oh, wow.

**Jaimal Soni** (0:56)
The importance of go to market in any business. I mean, I knew it was important before, but I think one of the biggest things, and Segment had an amazing product just to give some background there. It was a customer data platform. They connected data sources to data destinations at its core with an infrastructure play, but then as we moved up market, a lot of the marketing folks really started to gravitate towards the products we're building, and we eventually evolved the business towards more of a marketing buyer. Very much thought it was a developer first sales motion. Realized very quickly that can only get you so far. You have to bridge that gap between technical and marketing slash business buyer, and I think go to markets would ultimately help Segment achieve success. So in 2021, we got acquired by Twilio for $3.2 billion, and now it is a critical part of the Twilio offering.

**Brett** (1:44)
Is there a big lesson that you took away with from there? And I'm sure there's tons of lessons, but is there one specific one that was just almost burned into your brain as you approached founding this with your co-founders?

**Jaimal Soni** (1:53)
There are two things, I think. The first is the importance of discovery at every part of the deal. So early stage of the understanding the customer needs, making sure that you spend a ton of time asking the right questions, and that doesn't stop once the deal is closed. We often work post sales trying to make sure we can continue to understand. Maybe the economic buyer or someone has changed, or maybe the scope has changed from the customer perspective. So you've got to always be discovering, is what we would always say. Then the second is the importance of sales engineering. So when I first joined Sec, when I started and led the sales engineering function there, and did that for many years, we were moving back into product.
The importance of sales engineering, I think I cannot overstate that. Not to discount the amazing salespeople that the account executive and the theathems that we have, but sales engineering, it is this very unique set of skills that we had to hire for, which were somebody you can throw in front of a challenging business buyer that could speak the technical language and can understand the mechanics of the deal to help push it forward. And they're almost as Swiss Army Knights that any sort of deal, they kind of figure out what the next action needs to be and they help push it forward. So those are the two things I would say are cemented at the back of my head.

**Brett** (3:04)
And when it came to the founding of Insight Health, I'm sure that if you're like most, you had a list somewhere, whether that's digital or written down, of things to go after, problems to solve. For Insight Health, maybe just intro the problem that you solve and explain why you decided that was worth going out to solve.

**Jaimal Soni** (3:20)
So when we first started Insight, one of the big insights we had, and I would actually give the credit to the two doctors, a bit about our team. Isalt and Seran are more engineers at hard highlight product and go to market for a while at Segment and then became Twilio. We started the healthcare team there. Seran, prior to Insight, led in-front security at Twilio and before that at Visa.
We have two physicians on our founding team. We have a neurosurgeon, Dr. Pankaj Kaur, and a ED cardiologist, Dr. Eric Stecker. A lot of the credit goes to them. So the story is actually on a run, they were thinking about the opportunities of AI and healthcare. The obvious one, even when we started, was AI scribing.