Build From The Dock: Building and Scaling Health Tech
SEP 16
Wednesday, September 16
10:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Venture Dock, 555 University Ave, Palo Alto, CA
About the Event
Every health tech founder's path looks different on paper, but the hard parts tend to rhyme: the leap from research or a first company into building something new, the slog of turning a product into something buyers actually trust, and the moments where the plan has to change because the market said so.
This week's Build From The Dock brings together founders and investors working through that exact leap, moderated by Lochan Alagh, Co-Founder & Chief Growth Officer at Venture Dock and a startup investor.
We'll hear how a research background turned into a company, and how a physician-investor thinks about backing health tech at the earliest stage with a moderator who's spent years on both the operator and investor side of the table.
Featured Speakers
Lochan Alagh Co-Founder & Chief Growth Officer, Venture Dock | Co-Founder & Managing Partner, VC Nest
Lochan co-founded Venture Dock and also co-founded VC Nest, an early-stage venture fund. Before that, she spent over four years as Executive Director of FalconX Accelerator, and earlier worked in business strategy and operations at Cloud Harmonics (an Ingram Micro company). She also serves as Chief Governance Officer on the board of the IIT Bay Area Alumni Association.
Angela Jimenez, MD, MPS General Partner, Leon Precision Capital
Dr. Jimenez is a physician and two-time founder who now invests at the intersection of AI, biotech, and longevity as a General Partner at Leon Precision Capital. Her background bridges clinical medicine and scalable tech, she's worked as an ML trainer at OpenAI, lectured on life sciences at Stanford, and previously served as a Clinical Study Oversight Committee Member at the NIH.
Melis Yilmaz Balban, PhD
Neuroscientist and Founder, Neurosmart
Melis got her PhD from Harvard and did her postdoc as a research scientist at Stanford School of Medicine in the Huberman Lab, studying the neuroscience of stress. That research turned into Neurosmart, a wearable built to help people regulate stress in real time; she was lead author on a Cell Reports Medicine paper on structured breathing practices, and the company has grown out of Stanford's Hacking for Defense program into NSF-backed pilots with law enforcement, military, and athletic teams.
Agenda
10:00 – 10:30 AM — Welcome & introductions
10:30 – 11:30 AM — Panel: Building and Scaling Health Tech
11:30 AM – 12:15 PM — Audience Q&A
12:15 – 1:00 PM — Open networking
About Build From The Dock
Build From The Dock is Venture Dock's weekly founder series, where operators, investors, and practitioners share what they've learned building and scaling real companies. Every session is built for founders who want the unfiltered version, not the pitch-deck version.
What Venture Dock Offers Founders
Venture Dock is a founder-first community and fund built to help early-stage teams get unstuck faster. Members get access to weekly sessions like this one, a community of founders working through the same stage-specific problems, and direct lines to operators, investors, and experts across the ecosystem.
Become Part of the Venture Dock Community
If you're building something and want a community that actually shows up for you, we'd love to have you.