StarZero All shows Try the podcast clipper →

Atul Butte

Distinguished Professor and Director, BCHSI at UCSF · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

academicscientistfounder@atulbutte ↗bchsi.ucsf.edu ↗Wikipedia ↗

A pioneer in translational bioinformatics, he led efforts to mine massive biomedical datasets for novel diagnostics and therapies. He also co-founded several venture-backed biotechnology companies, including Personalis, NuMedii, and Carmenta.

12statements → 2claims → 1claims resolved → 4.17/5average certainty → 2.33/5average debate potential →

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not checkable as stated how the 2 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 1 assertion · 2 opinions · 7 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertion are the 2 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 1 names no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Atul argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Butte: University of California holds raw EHR data on 15 million patients
“We have fifteen million at the University of California. We have a total of fifteen million patients that we have raw EHR data on. So that's every drug, every dose, every vital sign. Every lab test result for fifteen million people, so that's about five percen…”
Atul Butte Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 39:55 a16z Podcast | Breaking Into Bio

How they sound: speaking style how? →

264 words/min while actually speaking · 3 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Atul Butte: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to 3,025 words across 1 episode, but every recording we have of Atul Butte is the aired feed, and an editor cleaned that audio before release. Some of the hesitation was cut before we ever heard it, so read these as floors: the true rates are at least this high. These are measurements of speaking style, not scores. How it's measured →

Everything Atul Butte said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Butte: Pitching AI as a doctor replacement immediately alienates healthcare customers
“I think there are other kind of silly things that companies do sometimes that are unnecessary, like say things like physicians are going away, right, with AI and deep learning. Yeah, the greatest way to Make us not want to accept your product, right? That kind…”
Atul Butte Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 4:12 a16z Podcast | Breaking Into Bio
Insight
Butte: Healthcare startups should target community hospitals before Stanford or UCSF
“There are other hospitals around here, medical systems and practices that are not Stanford and UCSF, and that's the first account you should try to get, not Stanford and UCSF.”
Atul Butte Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 5:35 a16z Podcast | Breaking Into Bio
Insight
Butte: Healthcare inefficiency is driven by systemic resistance, not friction
“Friction is the wrong model for what needs to get fixed in the healthcare system. It's resistance. Somebody makes every dollar in the 3.2 trillion dollar economy here. They like making that money.”
Atul Butte Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 33:36 a16z Podcast | Breaking Into Bio
Insight
Butte: Early-stage healthcare startups cannot serve both payers and providers
“Either you're going to go after providers or payers. You're rarely going to do both as a startup.”
Atul Butte Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 34:08 a16z Podcast | Breaking Into Bio
Disclosure
Butte: I forbid my academic lab members from entering ML competitions
“I forbid anyone in my lab to enter those competitions, because that's playing someone else's game.”
Atul Butte Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 25:05 a16z Podcast | Breaking Into Bio
Opinion
Butte: Small nation healthcare datasets deliver less impact than the US market
“Yeah, you could go to Estonia and Denmark and all these great places that have great data sets, but they're also small, and for impact, they may not have the same impact As it would have in our crazy healthcare non-system here.”
Atul Butte Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 40:22 a16z Podcast | Breaking Into Bio
Opinion
Butte: Skin mole AI apps tackle easy problems, ignoring complex medicine
“Deep learning of moles, cancer. Because that seems like a very intuitive kind of problem, but that's an easy one. We have many, many harder problems in biology medicine, but they take time to learn, so you have to be patient.”
Atul Butte Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 1:35 a16z Podcast | Breaking Into Bio
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Butte: The surge in AI talent will cause inevitable startup collisions
“Learn what others are doing, not to kind of steer around, but just be aware, like, what is the pace you're going to have to keep up with, what are the milestones you're going to have to get to, because it is getting, especially in the computer and AI and machi…”
Atul Butte Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 9:47 a16z Podcast | Breaking Into Bio
Insight
Butte: Healthcare branding equals trust and is often ignored by startups
“A lot of companies in this space really ignore the importance of branding. Branding equals trust, ok?”
Atul Butte Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 22:31 a16z Podcast | Breaking Into Bio
Insight
Butte: Finding the right clinical question matters more than ML model accuracy
“The hardest part in everything we do is figuring out what is the question to ask? What is the pain point? That you realize this is askable and answerable. This is modelable now, right? Five years ago we didn't have the data, now we do. That's way more importan…”
Atul Butte Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 25:19 a16z Podcast | Breaking Into Bio
Assertion Supported
Butte: University of California holds raw EHR data on 15 million patients
“We have fifteen million at the University of California. We have a total of fifteen million patients that we have raw EHR data on. So that's every drug, every dose, every vital sign. Every lab test result for fifteen million people, so that's about five percen…”
Atul Butte Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 39:55 a16z Podcast | Breaking Into Bio
Insight
Butte: Hospital Grand Rounds reveal unsolved clinical problems to computer scientists
“They have this amazing concept at academic medical centers called Grand Rounds, and they bring in an expert, right, and they talk about a disease, and it's maybe 30 minutes of everything you know about the disease, and the last 10 minutes, this is everything w…”
Atul Butte Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 28:42 a16z Podcast | Breaking Into Bio

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
a16z Podcast | Breaking Into Bio Jan 2, 2019 12m
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 1,000 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.

Try the podcast clipper Learn more