Big Picture Medicine #138 Six Lessons On Building a $100M Healthtech Company (Steve Kraus — Bessemer Venture Partners)
Feb 11, 2026
Steve Kraus, a Bessemer partner with two decades in healthcare investing, shares research-backed lessons on scaling healthtech. He talks about designing products that delight end users, tackling activation and clinician friction with ambient AI, navigating long founder-led sales cycles, investing early in customer success, and spotting emerging trends through deliberate information habits.
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Design For End User Delight
- Design your product to delight the end user, not just to please the buyer or procurement team.
- If clinicians, nurses, or patients don't use it, big contracts won't create value or retention.
Hinge Health As A Product Example
- Steve cites Hinge Health as an example of exceptional end-user engagement and retention in virtual care.
- Their user-focus and product design led to higher activation and better long-term value capture.
Do Founder-Led Sales Longer
- Stay in founder-led sales far longer than feels comfortable before hiring a VP of sales.
- Use long early sales cycles as an insight engine to learn positioning, pricing, and integrations.