No Operating Manual
A podcast about building healthcare companies when there’s no clear path and no one tells you what comes next.
Each episode features candid conversations with founders and operators working at the earliest stages, where decisions are made with incomplete information and roles are undefined. The focus is on the real work: what you learn, what you have to unlearn, and what it actually takes to make healthcare companies function in the real world.
No Operating Manual is a podcast about building healthcare companies when there’s no clear path and no one tells you what comes next. Each episode features candid conversations with founders and operators working at the earliest stages, where decisions are made with incomplete information and roles are undefined. The focus is on the real work: what you learn, what you have to unlearn, and what it actually takes to make healthcare companies function in the real world. Andrew Schutzbank, MD, MPH has spent 15 years chasing the same conviction: healthcare is a service business that refuses to act like one. In this episode, he traces his path from employee #3 at Iora Health, a role he started during his residency, through his time as CPO at Cricket Health, an operating partner at Scan Health, and now founder of Schutzworks, where he advises healthtech CEOs on their next move (and who to fire). He opens with the moment that set his whole career in motion: dodging a patient in the ER and realizing he’d become the very indifference he hated. From there the conversation is wide-ranging: why fee-for-service makes primary care feel “worthless,” why value-based care too often resembles a mob “bust out,” and why fixing payment is necessary but never sufficient. He explains what Iora actually changed (payment, people, and technology), why specialists have it easier than they admit, and what running the Schutzduck, trained on 15 years of his own writing, has taught him about giving advice. Along the way: a candid take on GLP-1s (including his own 75-pound journey), why LLMs finally crack a problem he couldn’t solve at Iora, what’s genuinely good about healthcare despite everything, and his closing advice for first-time founders. Equal parts blunt, funny, and hopeful from someone who believes that if we can fix healthcare, we can fix the world.
