Tom Whicher on building with purpose: reinvention, culture, and the future of health tech

Karen Falcon (Host, Performance & Development Lead at Tenzing):
Hello, and welcome to The Ascent. I’m Karen Falcon, Performance and Development Lead at Tenzing – a private equity firm passionate about the human stories between high-growth businesses and their teams. Guy, Tenzing’s co-founder, and I speak with driven and insightful founders, CEOs, and high performers. Previous series focused on the tech world; now we’re looking beyond. We talk through the highs, the lows, and everything in between – what fuels people, how they build standout teams, and how they keep pushing boundaries. No topic is off-limits, and every conversation is packed with lessons you can apply to your own journey.

Karen Falcon: Today, I’m joined by Tom Whicher, co-founder of DrDoctor, a digital health platform transforming the way hospitals manage outpatient care. Originally trained as an engineer and later a management consultant, Tom spotted a simple but powerful problem: missed hospital appointments were wasting time, money, and resources. So he co-built DrDoctor, a smart, patient-focused system that helps NHS hospitals digitise bookings, reduce no-shows, and give patients more control over their care. We talk about innovation in healthcare, the challenges and opportunities of scaling behaviour-change tech, and what it takes to build solutions that actually stick. A great chat with a true health-tech pioneer.

Karen Falcon: Okay—hi, Tom Whicher. You are CEO and founder of DrDoctor, which is a platform that helps clinics move to a hybrid model, removing administration and unnecessary face-to-face appointments from the NHS. What does that mean?

Tom Whicher: Hello, Karen. Hi—thanks for having me.

Karen Falcon: You are very welcome. What does that mean?

Tom Whicher: Great question. Well, fundamentally, the way that we’ve been doing healthcare for the last two, three, four hundred years hasn’t changed. If you go to Guy’s Hospital in central London, there’s a stone bench which Thomas Guy put there in the 1600s. And when people go to hospitals, they still sit on benches and wait. DrDoctor is all about shifting that model—moving to a model where you’re only seen face to face when you really need to be, and the rest of the time we can do it online using digital tools so you get a better experience and doctors can be much more efficient as well.

Karen Falcon: Where did that start?

Tom Whicher: Many moons ago—only 12, but maybe other bits started before that. I mean, I’m not a medic, right? I’m a ship scientist, of all things. And like many ship scientists, I finished my degree and I didn’t really know what I wanted to be. There aren’t many people that end up as yacht designers, and the ones that do tend to either be really smart or start with quite a lot of money beforehand.

Tom Whicher: So I did various things. I spent a year as a préparateur for the Solitaire du Figaro race. I worked in a chandlery in Bristol for a bit called Wet and Windy.

Karen Falcon: Yes, the best.

Tom Whicher: It was fantastic. And then I actually went and worked for my dad in an engineering company for a bit and started using my engineering degree, doing process engineering. That was fun, and it kind of made me realise what a real job looked like. Then I went and worked for a company called Newton Europe. Newton is a process-improvement consultancy, and we used to do all of our work on a no-win, no-fee basis—come to your factory, have a look at it, talk to the people, eye up the machines, and then rather than saying, “You should change these things,” go and change it for them, measure the results. So you’d be on the shop floor in the morning and the boardroom in the afternoon. Brilliant fun—so much fun. Met some people who are still really good friends of mine to this day, and met my two co-founders.

Tom Whicher: I was doing mostly fast-moving consumer goods—making things, chopping onions. I literally met my co-founder in an onion-chopping factory in Bedfordshire.

Karen Falcon: Incredible.

Tom Whicher: You’d sort of finish your day and you’d go and have a shower, and it smelled like, you know, a kebab shop. And then they sent me to do a project in a hospital in the Midlands, and I did not want to do that at all. Healthcare was messy, it was boring, it was slow. I was an engineer—I wasn’t interested at all. But as soon as I got under the skin of healthcare, I discovered how fascinating it is. I discovered this interplay between people and process that you don’t get in the same way anywhere else. And I also discovered how broken the system was.

Tom Whicher: So I spent a lot of time in outpatient clinics watching what the doctors were doing and watching what the patients were doing—trying to improve the financial efficiency of those organisations—but the fundamentals were broken. This is, I guess, 2011. I’d just got an iPhone—iPhone comes out in 2007. Paul Campbell-James had the first iPhone, trendsetter amongst us.

Karen Falcon: Exactly.

Tom Whicher: I remember thinking how cool it was. I’d just got mine and I was thinking, “You can do all sorts of things on these; surely this is going to change healthcare.” Hospitals were so far away from being able to even consider that. You literally had patients turning up with five or six different letters—printed A4 letters, we still get them, right?—with different dates and times, confused about why they were meant to be there. Sometimes to be told they’d missed their appointment and they’d been sent back to their GP, and they were angry because they’d been waiting months—or distressed.

Tom Whicher: So we thought, let’s try and solve this. Let’s try and build what we thought was going to be an app—and we can talk about the fact that it didn’t end up as an app—to allow patients to manage their outpatient appointments in hospitals. It was sort of a night in a pub; a picnic in Windsor Great Park with Bellinis; and then we pitched it to a startup accelerator called Bethnal Green Ventures. And from there, DrDoctor was born.

Karen Falcon: You say you met your co-founders. Obviously when you met them you didn’t know necessarily you’d be co-founders. What was it that brought you together to bring DrDoctor to life?

Tom Whicher: It’s a great question, because we weren’t best friends. We were colleagues and we really liked each other, but we weren’t best friends. I actually think that turned out to be a real positive, because we are three quite different people in many ways. There’s a lot of luck in choosing a co-founder—if you start a business with someone, you’re almost more tied in than if you married them, in many ways.

Tom Whicher: And I think, you know, if someone had said to the three of us individually in 2012, “You’re going to spend the next 12 years of your life fighting and crying and going through all these life events with these two others,” we’d probably all have gone, “Oh, are we? I’m not sure.” But as I said, Rinesh and I met chopping onions in a factory, and we got on. We’re very different humans: I’m an extrovert; he’s an introvert. He’s incredibly structured; I’m a bit more lackadaisical. But the combination seemed to work. And then Perrin happened to be doing a project with me in one of the hospitals. He’s our CTO—a real tech guy, slightly different background, computer scientist—doing tech at Newton rather than pure consultancy. Again, slightly different personality type, but there was something about the three of us that felt like we would make a really, really awesome team.

Tom Whicher: The way it’s tended to be is: I pitched the ideas—I don’t think it was my idea; I’m not going to claim that—but I brought the energy to those first few meetings. Rinesh brings the structure, the challenge, and the rigour; and Perrin makes it happen. That’s worked really fantastically for us. And having a triangle is a powerful thing as well.

Tom Whicher: I think co-founder dynamics are one of the biggest challenges for almost all organisations. Particularly in startups, you can almost tell if a startup is going to succeed or fail based on the dynamic between those people. When there are three of you, it’s much, much easier to resolve conflict and to deal with the ups and downs—because entrepreneurship is a hell of a roller coaster. It seems really exciting to start your own business, but be prepared to live your life in ups and downs which can completely wipe out everything else. Having three of you means that there’s always one that’s on the up, and there’s probably one that’s on the down, and you can support each other.

Karen Falcon: Fascinating. You talked about the various qualities and preferences of the trio. You get an idea, you start pitching it, you realise you’ve got something that’s going to happen—you’re going to need to start really working together rather than having picnics (although maybe you still have a lot of picnics, I don’t know). But you’re going to have to start bringing more people in. How did you start bringing people into that vision and reality that you three were starting to bring to life?

Tom Whicher: There are two parts of bringing people in: bringing in new team members, and bringing in clients. Certainly in our space—health tech—our key customers are big, large teaching hospitals. These are organisations that employ 15,000 people, have a billion pounds of spend, and all sorts of different people within them. So much of the way that we’ve managed to achieve commercial success is also about how we brought the people in.

Tom Whicher: But in terms of bringing people into our team—it was just the three of us for probably a year. When we started the accelerator, we were laughed at because we were the only people who didn’t write any code in those three months. We didn’t write any code, but we did loads of investigating and experimenting and learning. It was through that learning that we ended up building a product that was initially on text messaging—not an app—we can talk more about that. But we did need to hire some people; we needed to begin to write some code and we needed to scale it.

Tom Whicher: Those first couple of hires—cultural fit is the most important thing. We were incredibly lucky. The first two people we hired—one of them still works for us 12 years later. The other one only stopped working for us because he and his family moved to LA, and he continued to work for us from LA for a number of years; only in the last couple of years has he gone, “It’s too much.” His name was Steve. I knew Steve was going to fit in when we said—we didn’t have an office—“We’re going to interview you at the British Library.” We did lots of our early work at the British Library. So Steve’s like, “Okay, I’ll come to the British Library.” He turned up 40 minutes late, having gone to the British Museum, to find the three of us had given up on him and were having ice creams. We said, “Do you want an ice cream?” and he went, “Yeah, fine, I’ll have an ice cream.” We ended up interviewing him over a Mr. Whippy on a table outside the British Library. I thought, you know what—this guy’s going to fit in.

Tom Whicher: He’d worked at ASOS; a really talented developer. But what he shared was a willingness to get stuck in, not to be afraid of new problems, having that curiosity—and he was kind and had a sense of humour. When you’re making those early hires, you have to think about the founding team as a system—a system of people who have found a way to work together. Every time you add somebody new to that system, it’s a new system. It’s not that you bring someone into it; you have to think: instead of three of you, now there’s four of you—and that is really very different. You basically have to start again.

Tom Whicher: We decided to optimise for people who we thought would accept the way that we worked, would bring new skills, but wouldn’t require us to hugely change our culture. The other thing we really looked for were people who were driven by the mission. At those early stages of a startup, for us it was impact—and we are an impact business. We have impact written into our shareholders’ agreements; when we start our board meetings, we start with our impact measures. That’s what gets me out of bed every day—it’s like, “Wow, we have helped 135 million people’s appointments be booked in the NHS.” That’s the thing that’s exciting. The reason we have such longevity of team members is that they really care about what we’re doing and the mission. They actually care about it—it’s not a mission statement on a wall somewhere; it’s a sense of purpose.

Tom Whicher: I think it’s really key that your first—probably even 10 or 15—people are so bought into that mission. Through that, evolving the narrative but repeating the mission—you know, your narrative around that mission will change as you work with 20 million, as you work with a hundred million, you know.

Karen Falcon: And again, you talk about each individual early on, but the three of you co-founders are very central—have an ice cream with them! As time goes on, the three of you become possibly not as close to the interview process as you were. How have you made sure that that culture—which the three of you are still proud of and passionate about—spreads as you get more and more people?

Tom Whicher: It’s a good question. I’m a huge believer in culture. There’s that expression that culture eats strategy for breakfast—I 100% buy into that. We did interview everyone for the first few years, but very early on we started bringing other team members into the interview process. That’s important—it’s not holding it too tight. We still do that today: if we’re hiring an engineer, there will be engineers of that level involved in the interview process. That’s probably not unusual, but it’s really important for buy-in on both sides.

Tom Whicher: Culture only works if you really live it. You can write it down—and you should—and think hard about it, but it’s the things that you do which really instil it in teams. One of our cultural things is compassion. When we first started, we had a very short and snappy cultural statement which was quite sweary.

Karen Falcon: Okay. Am I allowed to be sweary?

Tom Whicher: Yeah, you go for it.

Karen Falcon: Depends on the swear words that Tom went to—you know, there are obviously some which are bad. So you go for it.

Tom Whicher: It was: “Get shit done, don’t be a dick.” That was our cultural statement. We had that on the wall in our offices for quite a long time. We’ve changed it now to “Be bold, have compassion, and aim high,” which I love, but it doesn’t quite have the same ring. We often still refer to the older one. The second part of that—have compassion, be kind, don’t be a dick—you have to live that if you want your teams to live it. You have to do things which make it real—make hard decisions which make that real.

Tom Whicher: That’s everything from the way you treat people when they have personal crises in their life. The big thing no one tells you about being a founder or a CEO is everybody’s life stuff is your life stuff, and how you decide to treat people resonates in your culture forever. So: how you treat people—having not just policies, but the spirit of the way you want to treat employees—and also the way that you treat customers.

Tom Whicher: We have lots of examples where we’ve decided to make what are objectively poor commercial decisions in the micro that are great cultural decisions in the macro, because our team members see that we are doing great things. Real-life example: COVID pandemic hits. Lots of people in various parts of health made a lot of money from the COVID pandemic. I don’t remember doing this, but apparently I stood up in front of our team and said, “We’re going to help our organisations transition here and we’re not going to profit from this. It’s really important.” One of our senior developers sent me a note literally yesterday saying, “I’ve just watched back the all-hands from last week—thanks for your consistent compassion. I still remember what you said during COVID; it inspired me to go and build Broadcast Message,” which is a tool we still use today and which he built pretty much on his own in two weeks of late nights. So that statement of “we are going to live true to our values” then resonates five years later and resulted in an amazing product and a really bought-in employee.

Tom Whicher: It’s those things that show what culture is. If you’re always demonstrating culture, people take it all the way through with them.

Karen Falcon: Absolutely. You can write down as much as you want, but people will see what is lived—they’ll see the behaviours. The thing I find exciting is when new people join, I say the culture is for you to shape; each individual can make a huge difference. They can really add to it—they can detract from it as well. But the clearer you make your behaviours that create the team which, for you, hums and lives what you want to live, the more they see very quickly if it’s the right behaviours or not.

Tom Whicher: They do. One person can make a huge difference—they really can. We went through a really difficult cultural phase post-COVID. I think a lot of people did—hybrid working, burnout. We ended up having a bit of a moaning culture in one of our teams. Once you have that, it’s really, really hard to break it—and extremely frustrating as a leader, because you can’t tell someone not to moan; that doesn’t work. You can try to listen and try to act on some of those moans, but it can become a self-fulfilling thing. We actually ended up having to ask some people to leave the organisation.

Tom Whicher: That’s the other big cultural thing. We talk a lot about compassion: compassion doesn’t just mean be nice; it means give really good, structured feedback at the right time; pick someone up on a poor behaviour; and sometimes it means asking someone to leave, because the system needs everybody to be bought into it. It doesn’t take much to begin to destroy that.

Karen Falcon: Do you and your two co-founders align—do you get together for those decisions, or does one of you take the lead?

Tom Whicher: We still make lots of decisions together. The other really interesting point is: for years the three of us were an incredibly tight unit, and that began to be a problem because we became the Founders with a big F. You almost have this Jesus-complex going on in the organisation where everyone looks to you to solve everything for them. Particularly if you’re used to working in a smaller team and the team’s got bigger, it’s easy to say something in an offhand way and for that to be interpreted as an instruction. I fell foul of that quite a lot. I’d join a product strategy jam and say something, and my interested comment would be taken as, “Okay, we need to change direction,” and they’d spend the next month changing their plans based on what I thought was a throwaway line. That’s super dangerous. So: giving people the psychological safety to challenge, making it clear that they have autonomy, and making clear when I’m inputting versus when I’m being directive—because you do need to do that too—is vital.

Tom Whicher: On decision-making: we really struggled with building an executive team. That was because we had three really strong founders. You bring somebody new into that, and they’re not a founder, and they’ve got their own ideas—and probably we think, “We’ve tried that before and it’s not going to work.” We failed to hire C-level execs again and again. We couldn’t work out why. Sometimes it was them—and more often it was us, I think. We only cracked that in the last couple of years, through being very strict with ourselves.

Karen Falcon: It’s interesting. There’s an author, Adam Grant, and something that stuck—probably because it’s geographical: organisations or teams have an archaeology (what’s gone before), a geography (where you currently are and what’s in front), and your North Star (what’s guiding you). That’s always stuck with me for “we tried, it didn’t work,” and my favourite thing is “then let me try.” But you need it two ways: people need to be aware how deep that archaeology is—are we living in the geography and looking around us, or are we holding ourselves back by what might have been? That alignment to the North Star allows autonomy. But, again, you have to step back to allow other people to step in.

Tom Whicher: Exactly. We have—but through hard work. Particularly when there’s 12 years of that. “We tried it before” is still a bit of a problem—whether it’s organisational design or product. The example of “we didn’t build an app” was absolutely the right thing in 2012. In 2025, consumer behaviour has changed and you expect to have multiple apps on your phone to do things—and we still don’t have an app and that’s still the right decision. But being challenged on a regular basis is really important. That can be difficult when you have limited resource and I would have done that—“Don’t even bother looking at it.” Knowing when to empower people and having the self-awareness to go, “All right, give it a go—prove it to me one way or another,” is important. We’ve got there, but it’s still an uneasy process sometimes.

Karen Falcon: Also, as the company grows and the team grows, you have to very deliberately reinvent yourself within the same job title. Your career progression is—I don’t know what comes next. It’s your personal development within that same position that’s key, and you have to reinvent and redefine. What does a CEO of 50 people mean? Very different to 100, to 150. CEO in 2012—very different to a CEO in 2025. How have you gone about reinventing yourself?

Tom Whicher: The reinvention is absolutely right—the job is utterly different in every way. Interestingly, I have been CEO now for quite a long time. For the first few years, we didn’t have any job titles—we were just doing the things—and that was fun and worked brilliantly. It was really hard to transition from three people who were fluid to one of us being the CEO. Really hard. That took longer than I appreciated to get right for all of us. It works really well now.

Tom Whicher: The reinvention stuff—I think this is true for all roles in startups—but having a curious, growth-minded mindset is the number one predicate for success, without a shadow of a doubt. It’s what I look for in every interview: is this person curious? If they’re curious, they’re going to learn and develop and change. If they’re not, and they’re a little bit static in their thinking, they’re probably going to suffer when you give them feedback; they’re probably not going to adapt to the world, which is more volatile now than it has ever been. If you ever needed to be able to deal with—VUCA, isn’t it? The VUCA is crazy right now. So that flexible mind is key.

Tom Whicher: For me there are a couple of facets. Number one is being humble: I don’t know the answer to everything. If you think you know the answers, you’re already in a fixed mindset. Listening to others—consulting—just generally listening. Whether it’s recruiting, sales, or product development, listening is the most underrated skill by a million miles. Listen and learn; have strong opinions when you need them; but the more open your eyes and ears can be, the more you’re going to learn from the environment around you.

Tom Whicher: I personally took an approach of: every time we had to do something new, I would go and buy the book. We had to build a marketing team—“All right, I don’t know anything about marketing”—go on Amazon, buy the top couple of books, read them, skim-read them, summarise them. Give myself a framework for what good looks like before I start trying to recruit or interview agencies. The cool thing about living in 2025 is that there is knowledge everywhere. If you’re not leveraging that knowledge, you’re doing yourself a disservice. We were giggling about ChatGPT earlier, but actually you can go and ask: “Summarise five marketing frameworks,” or “Summarise the NHS 10-year plan and give me an insight.” Research is easier than it’s ever been. That was always my first thing—buy the book—but these days, probably also use online tools to give yourself enough knowledge to be dangerous. Enough knowledge to be dangerous is a good place to be. You shouldn’t then try and execute it all yourself, but it’s enough that you can challenge and look at things.

Tom Whicher: The last one is coaching. I didn’t work with a coach in the first few years, but I went through quite a lot of accelerators—startup accelerators where you got essentially mentoring from people—and that was golden for us. Just to laugh: we got free space in Google Campus when we started our business. We left our consulting jobs literally on the Friday and went to work on the Monday. We turned up on the Monday in jackets and shirts in Google Campus and just looked like lemons—complete and utter lemons.

Karen Falcon: Did you arrive by pogo stick and scooter?

Tom Whicher: We should have scooted in—we should have. That might have done our clothing brand a bit better. I’ve got a photo of the three of us on that day and it’s really, really funny looking at it. I think we’ve aged quite well looking at that photograph—very goony, three enthusiastic guys. The mentoring we got on what it means to be a startup and to iterate and be agile was massive.

Tom Whicher: I started working with a coach probably six or seven years ago. I’d been wanting to work with a coach for a while—I was struggling with moving through the gears. I felt like I was hitting plateaus and, because of the emotional roller coaster, sometimes finding it really hard—getting into a dark place and feeling like this was impossible and it was too much. That is the thing about entrepreneurship: there will be days where you feel like that—and days where you feel like you’re king of the world. They often come quickly after each other.

Tom Whicher: I was super lucky to find someone I’ve worked with ever since—called Sam Axdal—who I met on the back of a boat.

Karen Falcon: Amazing.

Tom Whicher: I was sat on the back of a Fast 40 with a bunch of boys from Woodlands Way, having a great time—obviously. She was the owner’s guest. I was sitting on the back corner chatting—which is what I’m best at when it comes to sailing. It turns out she had recently qualified as a coach and had a really interesting background. We started working together and she completely changed the game for me—completely changed the game. We still see each other every six to 12 weeks, depending on intensity. I often come out feeling like I’ve done six rounds with Mike Tyson—mentally speaking. But she challenges; she brings thoughtful, constructive things into my awareness, and I wouldn’t have been able to succeed without that person in my life.

Tom Whicher: More than anything, for me, coaching does two things: it keeps you honest to yourself, and it takes you out of your unconscious-competent state into that conscious awareness. It makes you aware of the things you should be doing. The thing Sam says most often to me is: “Have you asked them?” Whatever it is you’re worrying about—why don’t you talk to that person? That is absolutely huge.

Tom Whicher: So, for me: listen, be curious and be humble; read and take advantage of the fact that all of the world’s information is available so quickly; and work with someone. It almost doesn’t matter who—it can even be “rubber-ducking” (we get our engineers to talk to a rubber duck)—that can be enough. Ideally a human—or an AI in 2025. Keep doing those things because it’s like the gym. When you stop doing it, you go backwards—your brain is a muscle. You can tell the people that bother with the mental gym and the people that don’t.

Karen Falcon: And implicit in that is the drive to go and do something about it. You want those people—the curiosity has to be matched with a bit of rocket fire.

Tom Whicher: Yes, exactly—let’s go. One of my favourite sayings: “Let’s go—we’ve got this.”

Karen Falcon: Go for it.

Tom Whicher: With the “let’s go,” you can tell the difference between someone who wants it and is going to go out there and make something happen, and a person who’s not really bothered and is quite comfortable. It’s so obvious. The other thing that goes with that is bravery. I sometimes call it walking through doors. So many of the things that have happened for us have been because of being willing to walk through a door you’re not sure about.

Tom Whicher: Someone once said to me, “Tom, you’re incredibly lucky.” I don’t believe in luck, but I do believe in putting yourself in positions where you can take advantage of the situation. That means everything from being willing to go and talk to someone really senior for the first time—it can feel really scary, within or outside your organisation (break the hierarchy). It could mean taking on a project that you’re a bit afraid of.

Tom Whicher: When I was doing more sailing, I was sailing on 40-foot boats with lots of our friends, and the navigator on a big superyacht got sick. Angie Green called me up and said, “We haven’t got anyone—will you jump on a plane and come and do this on a 150-footer with a bunch of America’s Cup sailors?” when you’re 25. Saying yes—“I’m not sure I know how to do this, but okay, I’m going to come and do it, and I’m going to work really hard when I’m here.” That’s how you create luck. The same thing is true with “let’s do it”—whether it’s a programmer who’s scared of a piece of the codebase so they don’t want to touch it, or a salesperson who doesn’t want to make that extra call to someone senior and just calls the people they’re comfortable talking to. A little bit of bravery—the willingness to walk through the door—you often find once you’re through it that you blossom.

Tom Whicher: Or you’ve stepped in, done a dance, and left the room again—but that’s okay. You’ve learned something. The Americans love to talk about “safe to fail.” The first startup event I went to when I was still consulting was an event called Fail Boat. I got the train—I was doing this job in the Midlands—and I got the train down, went to the conference, stayed in a skanky hotel room, and then went back up. I came back so inspired. It was the founder of LoveFilm, who had failed because he didn’t create Netflix. It was two guys who started Airbnb—but in the UK. Same idea, same time; they got acquired by Airbnb—so they did all right, but they didn’t start Airbnb. Then a whole bunch of other people had done things that, for various reasons, hit the rocks and went wrong. Watching these people—this is in 2011—stand up on a stage and talk… Some of them were really successful but had just missed, and they had the honesty to talk like that. Walk through the door, do the dance—it doesn’t really matter—but you’ve come back richer and having learned. The more we do that in our lives, the richer our lives are, and the more rounded and successful we become as people.

Karen Falcon: Absolutely. You can see the “let’s go.” You can see the door-rubbers—and sometimes the door-makers. You’ve got to be in the right place so that when a door is coming, push—“That’s mine; that’s mine.” Sometimes—is it luck? You’ve got to be there and ready to do it. You’ve got to have read those books or spoken to those people so that when that door comes past you’re like, “Hello.” It’s not a wind shift that you might be on totally the wrong side for. It’s there and you’re like, “Right—I’m through that.”

Karen Falcon: There’s that positioning of yourself so that when it presents, you’re going to do your best through it—and that part that you also can go through it, which is pretty cool.

Tom Whicher: Which is everything. With that, though, comes something I’m very passionate about. We have this idea of hustle culture at all costs—and that can be really dangerous. Walking through doors doesn’t mean take, take, take. You see that—lots of the TikTok stuff and social media is all about hustle. But if all you do is take, those people don’t succeed. You see it particularly in networking events. You go to a networking event and there’ll be someone there—usually young (not always), driven—talking to everyone in the room, really impressive, but they’re taking from everybody. They stand in front of someone and the first thing they do is pitch. If the first thing you do is pitch, you immediately switch the other person off. Successful networkers are people who give first: can you give everybody in that room something useful to them, that’s new to them, and you make a new connection? If you do that, those people will help you back.

Tom Whicher: It’s the same with opportunities: if you go into it with a “this is a one-plus-one situation,” you’ll create new value. If you go into it with “I’m going to take something out of this,” you may come out feeling like you’ve succeeded in that instance, but that doesn’t work over the long term. If you want to build sustainable organisations, always think of it as one-plus-one—it’s not a zero-sum game.

Karen Falcon: Absolutely. And that goes back into our workplace: how much are we asking, how much are people giving? Along with that is thinking it is two-way. It goes back to that culture piece: what’s the culture you’re creating which makes people happy to give, but also allows them to feel like they are being given to as well—so you’ve got that relationship internally as well.

Tom Whicher: 100%. Helping a colleague out—“I’m really struggling with this problem; can you help me?” Again, as we talk about it, I think about the high performers in DrDoctor—they’re the people who are always helping out with a bid, or someone’s stuck with a bit of code and they’re there pair-programming with them. Those people who give become really successful within organisations because everyone recognises them as contributors—but they then have that network they can draw on when they have a problem. I absolutely think it’s true internally.

Karen Falcon: And it creates a space where all those people can take more risks as well, because they’ve got maybe a bit more—not bandwidth—but they’ve accrued some space to be forgiven. Because they’re happy to give time, expertise, support—and then it often comes back.

Tom Whicher: Exactly. It’s cultural capital, ultimately. In good organisations—we’re all human and we all run on cultural capital at the end of the day. You can role-model that as a leader. Giving people time is really important. And that “don’t be a dick” bit—give feedback; give it compassionately; don’t take someone down in a meeting because you’re feeling angry that day.

Tom Whicher: The other big thing that plays into this is taking credit. Great leaders give the credit to the people around them—always. They don’t take the credit. Again, it’s all linked to: are we working as a team or as individuals? If you’re there taking the credit for the work that’s been done, you are not a team—you’re an individual—and it’s just not an effective way to work. It’s also not a fun way to be. Whether it’s co-founders or colleagues, you spend more time with them than your family; you may as well have fun while you’re doing it. I think fun people are more productive, personally.

Karen Falcon: I’ll align with you. So, you know, we’ve talked a lot about that compassion side—we’ve talked a lot about that desire to be curious, to learn, to reinvent. You’ve also had times where you’ve mentioned a couple of times about the app that you haven’t yet done—you’ve gone down a different route. You’ve talked also about, as you bring more people in at every level, you want people to challenge—and I guess challenge us: what are we missing? Why is that so important for you?

Tom Whicher: The challenge point is critical in organisations that want to innovate and scale. One of the things that has made me a successful entrepreneur—but is also a challenge for me—is I love change. I love change and I’m super comfortable with ambiguity. It’s almost my happiest place: a really ambiguous situation where we have to make uncertain decisions—that’s interesting for me. Sometimes that can be really disruptive in a CEO. If your preference is to always change things, that isn’t a very good scaling technique. But I don’t think any organisation in 2025 can afford to be static for any length of time. If you hire really great people and you don’t allow them to challenge the way you work or the things you’re building—or even, to an extent, your values—then why are you hiring great people? You’re wasting their talent. So for me, we make a great effort to have world-class people; listening to them and adapting our organisation based on what they’re saying is critical.

Tom Whicher: If you take our products and our market—In 2012, when we started, the thought of putting patient information online was barmy. Nobody was doing it. I literally got laughed at by IT directors of hospitals—“You can’t put patient information online; that’s illegal.” We were the first people to connect the NHS’s private data network up with the public internet. To do that we basically had to almost break a few rules—not quite—but it was right on the edge of what was allowed. We had to buy a physical computer in a physical place that was our network server—no spinning up of cloud compute. Then we had to go and challenge the information-governance people—the lawyers that look after patient data. We had to get the rules changed in order to do what we were doing in 2012.

Tom Whicher: The core of our product then was about patient engagement—sending a text message to make sure people turn up for their appointments. We still send 200 million text messages a year. But our value proposition has moved from that to solving the problem of supply and demand by removing face-to-face appointments. We’ve changed—our mission is the same (“help patients get access to great care”), but the way we’re doing it is really different. If you can’t continue to evolve, you’re not going to do that.

Tom Whicher: On patient information: in 2012 nobody was doing it. We created a market—put some small hospitals live. Then in 2016, we get Guy’s and St Thomas’—arguably the most famous teaching trust in the country (they would certainly say so; I probably agree). At that point they were a little bit backwards in their technology, it’s fair to say. We proved the value of what we were doing in a small number of clinics, and off the back of that the Chief Medical Officer, Ian Abbs—now the CMO—took a big bet to scale our product across the whole of Guy’s and St Thomas’. We were like 15 people at that point—this is a crazy thing. Suddenly we’ve got this massive, famous teaching trust doing this thing that a few years ago had been illegal. Really successful project—that was almost the making of the business. It’s never one moment, but it was an inflection point.

Tom Whicher: COVID hits. Post-COVID it becomes government policy that every hospital in the country needs one of these systems. So we’ve gone from “it’s illegal” to the government mandating that every hospital has to have a patient engagement platform. To watch that happen over 10 years is really exciting. I’m super proud of our role in making that market and being the trailblazers. But if you’re still in “I’m a hyper innovator who’s breaking rules to make things happen” mode, you can’t also scale at “the government’s putting money in, formal tender processes”—it’s a different type of competitive environment. If you haven’t got the mindset internally to keep changing gears, you just can’t respond to those very different environments.

Karen Falcon: There’s a framework called the SCAR framework (status, certainty, autonomy, relationships—often referred to as SCARF, with “F” for fairness). It talks about people’s motivators: what they’re motivated by, where they feel safe, and where they’re disrupted. That autonomy is really strong for you; certainty—no thank you. The relationships stand out as really key. It’s a blend within a team: how you described your co-founders earlier and the people you’re bringing in—to have a mix. If everyone is happy with high autonomy, okay; but if everyone needs high certainty, that’s a challenge; if everyone is motivated by status and recognition, that’s interesting. So, within the blend of people you’ve got, and as you bring people on—actually looking at all of them and how you pay attention to all of them—brings an ever-growing team to flourish. Disrupting, as well as bringing certainty—building the relationships in which uncertainty can flourish—is really key.

Tom Whicher: It is, absolutely. In our founding team—what we didn’t know—we’re still all operational in the business 12 years later, and that’s really unusual. If you look at us externally—if you’ve never met us—three very different people. Almost the deeper you dig, the more aligned we are. Deep down we share a very common sense of fairness (matters to all of us, very much). We all like autonomy. We all have a real sense of fun. Those things have kept us super aligned. I wish I could claim it was on purpose—it was luck. But I find that fascinating: what you see on the surface isn’t necessarily what drives people.

Tom Whicher: We’ve got a genius combination of people with different skill sets, different ways of approaching a problem, but fundamentally aligned belief systems underneath. If you can find that, you’re very lucky.

Karen Falcon: Well, yes, you are—but you’re not lucky.

Tom Whicher: Yeah, exactly—maybe the luck’s at the very beginning. You had to cross paths with those people—as you said, they weren’t necessarily friends before. There was some luck in that.

Karen Falcon: There was some luck in that.

Tom Whicher: And then there was a bit of making it as well, because we did pitch to each other and the three of us chose each other for a reason, I believe—and it turns out it was a good one.

Karen Falcon: I’m pleased about that—very pleased. You’re welcome. We’re going to go into some quick-fire questions. That’s been an awesome uncovering of some of the thoughts and ways that DrDoctor has gone from chopping onions and eating ice creams into serving so many people across 70 NHS hospitals, which has been fab. I’ve got four questions. Who or what inspires you?

Tom Whicher: I’m inspired by change. I don’t think there’s an individual I could point to that inspires me. I would say most of my heroes are fictional. I think a lot of the curiosity we spoke about earlier comes from reading fiction. People often think I’m talking about non-fiction books, but I like reading stories—because when you read a book, you get to see the world through someone else’s eyes, and that gives you perspective you can’t find anywhere else. So I wouldn’t choose a real-life individual; I would say I’m inspired by stories and narrative.

Karen Falcon: Any particular books that you feel have been inspirational, or a narrative you’ve taken?

Tom Whicher: This is really clichéd, but so much of my life has been inspired by reading Swallows and Amazons when I was a kid and making my dad take me to the sailing club.

Karen Falcon: Yes.

Tom Whicher: I read that book and I was like, “Come on—take me to Frensham Pond, take me to Frensham Pond, take me to Frensham Pond.” That kicked my life off in a direction it wouldn’t have gone otherwise, and I wouldn’t be the person I was without it.

Karen Falcon: You would not be the person without that book—I know it. What would be your best piece of advice for aspiring entrepreneurs?

Tom Whicher: Go and talk to as many people as you possibly can—people are so willing to help. It’s really flattering to be asked for help, and most successful people—if you ask them for five minutes—they’ll probably give it to you. Do that. Challenge yourself as to whether it’s something you really want to do—because it’s really hard. Incredibly rewarding; I wouldn’t want to do anything else with my life—but it isn’t for everyone. So go and talk to people and challenge yourself on it. It’s amazing how much you can validate before you do anything else. People think you need to go and write a pitch deck first—nonsense. Don’t do that. And definitely don’t raise money first. Validate your idea, get a bit of traction, and then go and find a great funder. But it’s that way around; it’s not “raise the money first and then try and work out what you’re doing with it.” So: talk to as many people as you possibly can.

Karen Falcon: And finishing off—maybe that was it—but what’s your guiding principle or a personal mantra?

Tom Whicher: I think it’s been woven through this: stay curious. Stay curious. I think the day you stop being curious is the day that you’ve retired and you go and—just go and lie down somewhere.

Karen Falcon: Not sure where.

Tom Whicher: Yeah, exactly. But be curious about things and stay interested, because the world is full of fascinating stuff—and you can go and build an app in 20 minutes using AI now. The only barrier between innovation and change and people is how curious they are and whether they’re brave enough to go and try it. So yeah—curiosity.

Karen Falcon: Let’s go.

Tom Whicher: Let’s go.

Karen Falcon: Thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been a superb conversation with you.

Tom Whicher: No worries, Casbo. Lovely to see you—thanks for having me.

Karen Falcon: You’re very welcome. What an engaging chat with Tom. He first came to Tenzing to speak at the Altitude Academy team training about his experience as a CEO of being invested in. He connected with the team with his balance of people and process—diligence of the firm and diligence of the people—and once again, the conversation came to building a high-performance team. If you enjoyed listening to that conversation and want to hear more inspiring stories, then you can search “Tenzing” wherever you get your podcasts. We’d love you to rate and review this episode. Please don’t forget to subscribe. You can find out more about us on tenzing.pe, on LinkedIn, or on Instagram. Bye for now.