Company leader
Reshma Khilnani
Co-founder and CEO
Medplum
Reshma Khilnani is the co-founder and chief executive of Medplum, a company whose open-source tools let software teams build their own electronic health records. She earlier co-founded MedXT, a medical imaging company that Box bought in 2014, and Droplet, an at-home diagnostics company that Ro bought.
Growing Up Near Stanford
She was born in Palo Alto, on the Stanford University campus, and took to programming early by building web apps. Looking back, she sees "the joy of building was my initial introduction to it, and I still love it today".
At 15 she nearly gave up on computer science because she felt behind classmates who had programmed games. Her advice to teenagers in the same spot is plain: "Don't opt out of computer science because you think you are behind."
MIT, Microsoft and Facebook
She earned a bachelor's degree in computer science and a Master of Engineering at MIT. She then worked on product teams at Microsoft, where she met her first co-founder, and at Facebook.
Building MedXT
She left Facebook in December 2012 to join Y Combinator's Winter 2013 batch with MedXT, an online service for storing and managing X-rays, CT scans and pathology slides. She planned to spend the program building technology, but the partners expected her to sell the product before Demo Day. She remembers thinking, "There is no way I can sell it in less than 3 months!"
Their answer was "Figure it out." MedXT found a first buyer that used it for backup, which needed no regulatory clearance, and that client later signed an enterprise contract. Box bought MedXT in October 2014.
As MedXT's chief technology officer, she found that standing out helped her in recruiting, sales and fundraising. "I'm a woman, I'm in enterprise software, I'm a CTO, and I'm very tall," she said of why people remembered her.
Venture Capital and Droplet
She went on to work in venture capital and served as a Visiting Group Partner at Y Combinator, where she worked with many commercial open-source companies. She also co-founded Droplet, an at-home diagnostics company that Ro bought.
Leading Medplum
She started Medplum with Cody Ebberson, a former senior director of engineering at One Medical, and Rahul Agarwal, who worked at Palantir and Applied Intuition. Medplum sells an open-source base that developers use to build custom health records, such as an app for children with special needs.
She holds that a team can move fast in a regulated field if it leans on testing: "Test-driven development is your best friend in the regulated industry." At Medplum each test is tagged with the regulation it supports, so auditors' questions can be answered from source control.