- In 2015, Galym Imanbayev started a dual MD-MBA program at Stanford.
- But when he graduated, he skipped residency and went to work at the VC firm Lightspeed.
- He explained how his med-school training had helped him become a better startup investor.
Two years after finishing undergrad, Galym Imanbayev headed back to Stanford’s campus to begin his medical training — even though he’d already decided he probably didn’t want to become a full-time practicing doctor.
Today, he’s putting that medical degree to a different use case from practicing medicine. Imanbayev is a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, a venture-capital firm that has backed high-profile technology and consumer companies such as Snapchat and the Honest Co. His hiring in 2020 has helped Lightspeed jump-start its growing ambitions in healthtech investing.
MDs are something of a rarity in VC and tech, an industry that reveres the college dropout when it comes to startup founders, with wild successes in Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Jack Dorsey, and countless others.
But in the healthtech community, holding an MD or Ph.D. can give investors a leg up when it comes to assessing the viability of startups hoping to cure diseases or achieve medical breakthroughs.
For Imanbayev, who also earned an MBA from Stanford while completing med school, his training to become a doctor provided a host of transferable skills that have made him a successful VC.
“The framework of clinical thinking and diagnosing a patient — assessing their structure, history of illness, past medical history, family and social history — is an uncanny parallel to how I look at a new company,” he told Insider in an interview. “If you’re not smelling the patient, you’re failing your physical exam. Treating an examination of a startup is the same.”
A passion for both medicine and economics
Born in Kazakhstan, Imanbayev had an early introduction to healthcare thanks to his father, who worked on healthcare reform following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Imanbayev remembers trips in his childhood to rural areas of the country to help deliver medical supplies and spoke of the influence this work had on people with tuberculosis.
Imanbayev’s family immigrated to the US when he was 8 years old as political asylum seekers and settled in a suburb of Portland, Oregon. As he grew up, he excelled in science programs, and as a teenager, he spent two summers doing cardiac research as part of an Oregon Health & Science University apprenticeship program.
During his senior year of high school, Imanbayev discovered another interest, entirely by chance. When he needed one more elective to fill out his class schedule, he landed on AP macroeconomics — and ended up loving it so much that he chose economics as his undergraduate major at Stanford, while fulfilling his pre-med requirements.
“I lived in these two worlds during undergrad and came to understand that when it comes to economic issues and health issues, you cannot solve one without the other,” he said. “That evolved my thinking about whatever I decided to do in medicine. I decided it needs to involve structural economic forces as well.”
After mistiming his MCAT, Imanbayev faced one gap year before he could start medical school. He ended up taking two, spending his time at first consulting for PwC’s pharmaceutical group and then interning for Martis Capital, a private-equity firm that invests in middle-market healthcare companies.
Even though the firm wanted him to stay on full time, Imanbayev decided to put investing on the back burner and return to school to obtain an MD-MBA dual degree from the Stanford School of Medicine and Stanford Graduate School of Business.
“The 101 of digital health is how to improve patient health. There are deals that aren’t getting funded that should be, and vice versa,” he said of his decision to go back to med school despite a budding career in VC. “A physician’s perspective does give you the ability to apply the patient-impact lens more effectively, and physicians should have a voice and be a stakeholder in terms of where capital is stewarded.”
Med school as a training ground for VC
When Imanbayev headed back to campus in 2015 for his dual-degree program, he said, Stanford’s medical-school community was welcoming of his nontraditional background and affirmed his interest in eventually returning to some sort of investing.
“I knew going back that investing was going to be part of my career at some point, but I didn’t know when, or if, I would split my time investing versus practicing medicine,” he said. “I came into it thinking I would be some sort of hybrid, and Stanford was open to this outcome compared to other schools.”
Imanbayev described that in his white-coat ceremony, Dean Lloyd Minor’s speech focused on the influence the cohort would have not only as clinicians but also as entrepreneurs, as well as the people supporting them.
As he jumped into the grueling demands of medical school, Imanbayev said that for everything he studied, there were additional things he wanted to add on and learn.
“I treated rotations and classes as mini-internships for all of the different practices and specialties, so there were additional learning opportunities to weave in my questions about systems as well as economics,” he said. “During each rotation, I was a medical student, but I was also improving as a future founder or investor.”
As he neared graduation, Imanbayev weighed his options: heading to residency and eventually practicing medicine, going directly back to VC, or trying to juggle both.
Imanbayev said he believed he had received enough value from his medical- and business-school classes and was wary of spending five more years completing a residency program during some of the peak productive years in his life.
So when Lightspeed came calling, he was excited to answer, Imanbayev said.
“It was important for me to get into venture earlier,” he said. “The urgency seemed really high.”
Helping Lightspeed push into healthtech investing
Since 2020, Imanbayev has been a partner at Lightspeed focusing on the health sector.
Imanbayev said he was attracted to Lightspeed not only because of its dedication to growing its healthcare practice but also because it valued the expertise that MDs and other advanced-degree holders could bring to the firm.
“You can have a great healthcare-investment career without an MD, but it adds a level of depth that can accelerate your career or make you more successful,” he said.
Today, five Lightspeed partners are signing healthtech and life-sciences deals, including investments in the panic-disorder treatment Freespira, which has raised $20 million; the biotherapeutic startup Ancora Biotech, which has raised $60 million; and Curve Health, a caregiving startup focused on older people that has raised $10 million.
Imanbayev himself has spearheaded investments for Lightspeed in the healthcare-equity startup Soda Health and the virtual-care startup Wheel. Earlier this month, he led a $260 million Series F investment in the primary-care network Aledade — one of the largest healthtech deals this year.
“I was just a few years out of grad school with some previous investing experience, but now I sit on five board seats and have deployed a lot of dollars,” Imanbayev, who focuses on life sciences and healthtech and services, said. “I’ve been very fortunate by the level of responsibility and growth that this fund has provided me.”
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