One person you can actually reach.

Why healthcare, and why me

I built a healthtech platform and eventually sold it. Twenty-five thousand patients used it and more than $6.5 million moved through it. What I learned there was that the software is rarely the hard part. The hard part is the twelve people whose working day it changes, the regulation governing what you may do with a single piece of information, and the plain fact that a clever system nobody at the front desk wants to use is worth nothing at all.

Since then I have been founder and CTO of Slate, a fintech company. Before that I led product for risk, compliance and cards somewhere we issued over $50 million in credit and went from a hundred customers to several thousand. Earlier than that, product operations at Instagram on machine learning and infrastructure tooling.

The thread running through all of it is regulated industries. In healthcare and finance, getting data handling wrong produces a notification, a fine and a lawyer rather than an apology. I have spent ten years building under that constraint. It is the same constraint a dental or medical practice sits under the moment somebody suggests pointing an AI at their patient records.

Why this business

The same piece of work costs a mid-size company six figures and costs almost nothing for a ten-person practice, and almost nobody is doing the small version. The consultancies will not get out of bed for it. The software vendors build for their average customer. That leaves a practice owner with a stack of AI newsletters, a cold call from somebody selling receptionist software, and no way to tell which half of it is real.

I built Halsted AIto be the thing I would want if I owned a practice. A fixed price. A written plan. Somebody who has shipped this under real regulation. And a willingness to say “buy the $80 tool and keep the rest of your money” when that happens to be the right answer.

About the name

William Halsted was the surgeon who turned surgery from a talent into a system. Sterile technique, the residency, the idea that a good outcome should be repeatable rather than heroic. AI in a small business follows the same rule. As a heroic one-off it fails within the quarter. As part of how the place runs, it lasts.