Dr. James Mault is an entrepreneur extraordinaire.
In addition to founding and leading numerous startups, he’s the named inventor on more than 80 patents. Mault has held various leadership positions through the years and currently serves as the CMO and SVP of Qualcomm Life, which acquired HealthyCircles, one of the companies he founded. On top of all that, he’s a surgeon.
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But Mault doesn’t think all his roles are equally challenging. During a March 28 live-streamed Tales from the Trenches event at Chicago-based Matter, he recalled the time a reporter asked him which was more stressful: being the CEO of a newly publicly traded company or being a heart surgeon (both of which he’s done).
Mault said he answered the reporter as such: “That’s easy. [Being] the CEO of a publicly traded company is far more stressful than doing cardiac surgery.”
As a heart surgeon, Mault doesn’t have to get lawyers or contracts involved. Among clinicians, there’s an environment of trust. “There is an ethical commitment to providing care and doing no harm and you can trust people,” he said.
In the business world, Mault said he’s negotiated huge contracts involving dozens of lawyers … but months later, the other organization decided to get out of the contract.
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That element of trust is important to Mault in both the operating room and the C-suite. While recruiting for his executive team, Mault looks for individuals who are trustworthy and have integrity. But as a leader, you still make mistakes.
“Some of the lessons I’ve learned progressively over the years is you’re never perfect in recruiting everybody,” he added. “Sometimes you think it’s the right person and then it’s not.”
What about individuals who want to get involved in healthcare but don’t have a clinical background? Mault had a bit of advice for them. “You’ve got to learn what it means to code,” he said.
Looking forward, Mault is positive about the future of digital health. The next 10 years in the field won’t be about the devices, gadgets or connectedness. Instead, they’ll be about “intelligent health,” or what we’ll be able to do with the digital data we’ve gathered.
“One hundred years from now, we will look back at this next 10 years between 2020 and 2030 as being one of the most profound moments in the history of medicine, in the history of human health — on par with the likes of the introduction of anesthesia in the 1850s, the introduction of antibiotics and immunizations in the turn of the 20th century,” Mault said.
Photo: phive2015, Getty Images
