Intro
This is not a story of a 28-year-old successful serial entrepreneur, nor a work of personal development literature. It is rather an auto-dissection of a very regular and tired doctor who was arrogant enough to co-found a medical startup and become its chief executive officer (CEO) without having any qualifications for it whatsoever.
It is also not a story of great success (yet) merely because the journey is in its diapers and success is yet to be proven.
It is a diary, the chapters of which will be written across the lifespan of the startup. May it have a long and prosperous life.
It is also a self-trial in exposure. A genuine laparotomy of our journey, in an attempt to promote frank discussion and perhaps empower one or two physicians to pursue this path themselves, with the true belief that more medical companies and startups should be built and run by medical specialists.
Chapter 1: Tunnel vision
I am 44 now. Up until 3.5 years ago, my life was the perfect ride on an ultra-speed bullet train called medicine. Medical school, internship, radiology residency, interventional radiology (IR) fellowship, attending position at a large hospital, chief of IR service, private practice, a master of business administration (MBA) somewhere in the middle, and of course, meeting the love of my life and having three beautiful children, just to become an “on-call dad.”
There is a thing about very fast rides, especially in medicine, you can clearly see only what is directly ahead, while your peripheral vision is completely blurred. Most of the day you are on absolute autopilot, with rare moments of self-reflection only when you drive to and from the hospital. Even in those precious moments, your thoughts circle around the last procedure or the upcoming one, an annoying colleague, or whatever magic to pull out of the hat to finally convince management to approve the additional nurse position your unit so desperately needs.
This tunnel vision of a busy medical career is probably the worst soil for creative ideas to germinate. Even if these ideas manage to somehow emerge, they die extremely quickly, simply because there is no time to water them.
For me, this train ride would probably have continued until the final station, or a premature crash, and the speed and adrenaline of it would likely have kept me happy enough for the rest of the journey. Unless a strange thing happened.
Chapter 2: The burnout
It was a regular Tuesday in June 2022. The evening before, I had finished at my private practice around 11 p.m., got called to the hospital at 3 a.m. for a bleeder embolization, slept a little, performed several procedures during the morning shift, and scrubbed in for a dialysis fistula percutaneous transluminal angioplasty (PTA) as the first case of the after-hours shift. As I said, regular Tuesday.
After administering local anesthesia, out of the blue my vision blurred. Pre-syncope, chest tightness, hyperventilation, dear God. Of course I arrived at the inevitable, well-informed-by-medical-education conclusion: I am having a myocardial infarction (MI). What?! At the age of 41, with no risk factors? That is unlucky.
The next thing I knew, my team was rolling me in a wheelchair directly from our catheterization lab to the emergency room (ER). A ride of shame, me in scrubs, being wheeled through the corridors I had ruled just an hour before.
To my surprise, and as a blow to my self-diagnostic capabilities, I had not had an MI. Everything was normal. Electrocardiogram (ECG), troponin, echocardiogram, all labs, and even a cardiac computed tomography angiography (CTA). I was 100 percent healthy, and yet I could not get out of bed for the entire two weeks that followed, which was a sufficient period of time to arrive at a more informed medical diagnosis: burnout.
Now, please understand, I come from a Jewish family with Russian origins. There is no such word in our lexicon as burnout. I was raised in an achievement-based belief system where taking a sick day was considered failure. Burnout?! (Please read the following lines with a heavy Russian accent.) “What?! Great-grandfather was fighting Nazis with knife in his mouth, killed polar bear with his bare hands to survive while completing a doctor of philosophy (PhD) in theoretical physics! Grandmother survived blockade of Leningrad on one piece of bread per month, and you say burnout?! You are weak! Weak! Get up, jump in ice pool, slap yourself, and go to work!” This is what my upbringing told me during those two weeks. And yet, I could not.
Although burnout is extremely common among doctors (above 50 percent, with a severe debilitating form in 10 to 20 percent of cases), we rarely speak about it and NEVER think it will happen to us, until it does. As I discovered myself, it was a very real thing. And frankly, quite frightening. At the peak of my career, with three young children at home, it was an unsettling revelation to realize that I am not Superman. Bummer.
Recovery took time and the support of my extraordinary life partner and my team at work. It was a journey of self-reflection that made me slow that train ride and expand my peripheral vision. I did not know it yet, but the peripheral vision was about to show me something I had never seen before.
Maxim Saksonov is a diagnostic and interventional radiologist with more than fifteen years of clinical experience spanning residency, fellowship, and senior attending roles, including service as chief of an interventional radiology division. Trained in both diagnostic and procedural medicine, he has worked at the intersection of imaging, intervention, and clinical operations throughout his career.
He also holds an MBA, earned alongside the demands of clinical practice and department leadership. What began as an effort to better understand the business side of medicine ultimately led him into entrepreneurship. Dr. Saksonov is now the chief executive officer and cofounder of WillyAI, an early-stage platform for personalized ambient medical documentation that is currently deployed across medical institutions in multiple countries.
He shares professional updates on LinkedIn.
