🎙 Dr Farzana Rahman on Building a Radiologist-Led Team, Why Junior Doctors Thrive in Startups, and Hexarad's Series B Growth

Dear Readers,

This week on Out of Programme, we’re joined by Dr Farzana Rahman — a consultant radiologist who, alongside three fellow radiologists and a philosophy-turned-coder CTO, built Hexarad into a Series B health tech company. Her journey from clinical practice to scaling a startup reveals how clinician founders think differently about building, hiring, and navigating the UK’s health tech landscape. The story also reveals something unexpected: why junior doctors make exceptional employees in non-clinical startup roles.

🎧 Watch the full episode on YouTube:

You can also listen on: 🎧 Spotify

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🏥 From Consultant to Founder – Without a Business Background - Farzana fell into medicine as a gifted problem-solver, not through a lifelong calling. Yet founding Hexarad wasn’t about abandoning medicine – it was about solving healthcare problems differently, and she did it without an MBA.

💻 Why Four Radiologists Built a Company Together - Each founder’s strength became obvious immediately: Farzana the visionary, Jay the executor, Sam the finance expert, Amy the commercial strategist. The question “who should be CEO?” wasn’t really a question.

🧠 Junior Doctors Are Startup Superstars - Hexarad hires junior doctors into non-clinical roles because they think on their feet, assimilate information rapidly, make decisions without paralysis, and thrive in the deep end – skills far more valuable than domain expertise in an AI-democratized world.

🚀 Building as a Side Project, Then Making the Leap - Hexarad started while all founders maintained clinical practice. With that safety net, the risk assessment was simple: why not try? Farzana made the leap to full-time founder at exactly the right moment.

Farzana’s story is proof that:

• 💡 Clinician founders have an unfair advantage – they understand the problem space, constraints, regulatory landscape, and what actually matters to end-users

• 🚪 You don’t need a business background to scale a company – you need good people, a growth mindset, and the willingness to ask for help

• 🧠 Junior doctors are underutilised talent in tech – trained to handle high-pressure, high-ambiguity situations with incomplete information and scarce resources

• 🤝 Building a strong culture at scale requires radical candour, coaching, and psychological safety

As Farzana says:

“Doctors are risk-averse people, but what’s the real risk? You have a job you can always go back to. Why not just give it a go and have a bit of an adventure?”

💡 Subscribe for more stories of clinicians building outside traditional medicine:

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If you know someone considering a founder’s path – or someone who thinks they’re “too junior” to work in tech – share this episode with them.

Until next time,

Dr Jing Ouyang

👉 Follow me on LinkedIn for a behind-the-scenes look and reflections on Out of Programme.