Chasing safe revenue is where innovation goes to die

Lately, as I build Manna, I have been feeling a profound tension that every founder in healthcare eventually faces. It is the friction between the desire to build something that tangibly changes the delivery of care and the lure of leveraging existing channels for short-term revenue.

In the world of health tech, there is an abundance of "easy" money. There are dozens of ways I could plug Manna into the current, broken machine to generate immediate cash flow. On a spreadsheet, choosing those legacy revenue streams looks like the responsible move. It extends my runway and satisfies traditional metrics.

But I have come to realize that this "safe" revenue comes with a hidden, compounding cost. I call it the Gravity of the Status Quo.

The moment I start chasing revenue that validates the current system, the pull of that system intensifies. I start hiring people to manage the status quo. I start designing features to fit within the constraints of outdated provincial billing models. My roadmap begins to bend, almost imperceptibly, toward the very problems I set out to solve rather than the solutions I envisioned.

With every passing day spent playing by the old rules, it becomes exponentially harder to break away and build the revolutionary change our healthcare system actually needs. You don't just build a business; you build an inertia that makes radical innovation feel "too risky" to return to.

I didn’t start Manna to be a slightly more efficient cog in a failing machine. I started it to build a new engine.

This means I have to make the harder choices:

• Saying no to revenue that reinforces the wrong clinical behaviors.

• Accepting the risk of a more difficult path to ensure the ceiling remains high.

• Prioritizing interoperability and remote care even when the current infrastructure isn't ready to reward them.

Building in healthcare is a marathon through a minefield. It is incredibly tempting to stop and set up shop in a "safe" spot. But I know that those safe spots are exactly where innovation goes to die. I have to keep pushing toward the friction, because the only thing more dangerous than failing is succeeding at building the wrong thing