No Operating Manual

About No Operating Manual

No Operating Manual is a podcast about building healthcare companies when there’s no clear path and no one tells you what comes next. Each episode features candid conversations with founders and operators working at the earliest stages, where decisions are made with incomplete information and roles are undefined. The focus is on the real work: what you learn, what you have to unlearn, and what it actually takes to make healthcare companies function in the real world.

Publisher

Erin O'Brien

Category

business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

21 Jan 2026

Latest episode

30 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

24 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   30 Sept 2026

   Grief as Fuel: Kaitlin Christine on Building Gabbi to End Late-Stage Breast Cancer

   In 2013, Kaitlin Christine's mother, Lisa Gabrielle, got a clear mammogram. Weeks later she was diagnosed with stage four metastatic breast cancer, and she died less than eight months after that. When Kaitlin went through her mother's medical records, she found two things that should have changed everything: a family history strong enough to warrant genetic testing that never happened (her mother had an undiagnosed BRCA mutation), and extremely dense breast tissue that made mammograms the wrong screening tool. A year and a half later, at 24, Kaitlin was diagnosed with breast cancer herself. In this episode of No Operating Manual, host Erin O'Brien talks with Kaitlin about turning grief into purpose. She explains what she learned as an account executive at Myriad Genetics, including why appropriate testing went up whenever she brought lunch. That work led her to found Gabbi, which is named after her mother and aims to eradicate late-stage cancer by making sure every woman knows her risk.

2. 

   19 Aug 2026

   I Became the Post Office I Dreaded | Andrew Schutzbank, MD, MPH on Fixing Healthcare

   Andrew Schutzbank, MD, MPH has spent 15 years chasing the same conviction: healthcare is a service business that refuses to act like one. In this episode, he traces his path from employee #3 at Iora Health, a role he started during his residency, through his time as CPO at Cricket Health, an operating partner at Scan Health, and now founder of Schutzworks, where he advises healthtech CEOs on their next move (and who to fire). He opens with the moment that set his whole career in motion: dodging a patient in the ER and realizing he'd become the very indifference he hated. From there the conversation is wide-ranging: why fee-for-service makes primary care feel "worthless," why value-based care too often resembles a mob "bust out," and why fixing payment is necessary but never sufficient. He explains what Iora actually changed (payment, people, and technology), why specialists have it easier than they admit, and what running the Schutzduck, trained on 15 years of his own writing, has taught him about giving advice. Along the way: a candid take on GLP-1s (including his own 75-pound journey), why LLMs finally crack a problem he couldn't solve at Iora, what's genuinely good about healthcare despite everything, and his closing advice for first-time founders. Equal parts blunt, funny, and hopeful from someone who believes that if we can fix healthcare, we can fix the world.

3. 

   4 Aug 2026

   The Minnesota Home-Field Advantage: Mary Grove on building coast-to-coast VC from the mid-west

   In this episode of No Operating Manual, Erin O'Brien talks with Mary Grove, managing partner at Minneapolis-based Bread and Butter Ventures, an early-stage firm investing in digital health, enterprise SaaS, and food tech. Mary traces her path from 14 years at Google, starting on the IPO team in 2004 and later founding Google for Startups. She then moved to the Midwest and a career in venture, first at Steve Case's Revolution and then co-founding Bread and Butter in 2020. The conversation centers on the firm's "Minnesota home-field advantage" thesis: tapping the country's highest per-capita concentration of Fortune 500 companies; Cargill, General Mills, 3M, Mayo Clinic, through its Innovation Circle, a group of 20 enterprise partners that opens commercial doors for portfolio companies nationwide. Mary explains how those partnerships come together, and shares how industry validation drives dealflow, and describes how she evaluates companies across sectors. She also shares how fund managers raise capital, what a 10-year fund lifecycle involves, and why pitching LPs resembles a startup pitch. From there, the discussion turns to why "team, team, team" tops her rubric, how she reads red flags in founder dynamics, what makes health tech compelling in the AI era, and her fundraising advice for founders.

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

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Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.