Atul Butte
Distinguished Professor and Director, BCHSI at UCSF. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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.
1shows
1appearances
12statements
1resolved
1supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
Everything Atul Butte said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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?”
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…”
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…”
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…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Atul's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 a16zLEDGER | Distinguished Professor and Director, BCHSI at UCSF | 1 | 12 | 100% 1/1 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |