United States – October 23, 2026 -- Health2047, the venture studio of the American Medical Association, splits a marketing and communications executive's time 50/50 between its own brand and its portfolio startups, which range from obesity phenotyping to radiology AI.
Health2047 operates as an agency model, not just a fund
The studio builds and backs early-stage healthcare companies and supplies them with professional services instead of only writing checks. Its portfolio includes an obesity phenotyping company, a foundation model for radiologists and a physician-founded Medicare Advantage plan.
Storytelling drives VC decisions on founders
Investors look for coachability, team chemistry and domain expertise, and the executive says all three come down to storytelling. Coachability means showing that feedback from an investor's first pitch check is visibly reflected in the next narrative. She points founders to Christina Farr's book The Storyteller's Advantage.
Founder blind spots vary by background
Technical founders can fixate on their solution rather than the customer's problem, which puts product-market fit at risk. Physician founders, who often still see patients, know the problem well but can struggle to scale into other markets. Repeat founders recognize patterns quickly but can over-rely on one playbook.
She also tells founders to treat a press release like a pitch deck. A pitch meeting may deliver 30 minutes with an investor, while a press campaign offers multiple chances to tell the story.
Async tools served a 50-person Series A company
For a Series A company with about 50 employees across time zones, communicating asynchronously in Slack, her team recorded Loom videos ahead of a major announcement. It also ran an Ask Me Anything thread in Slack, which let employees get ahead of the story.
Fully AI-generated content risks "automation decay"
Citing Cory Doctorow's The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, she warns against generating content whole cloth to meet answer engine optimization (AEO) pressure. Content written by LLMs and then read by LLMs decays, and LLMs can recognize their own output.
Startups have no prescribed tech stack, which gives them flexibility with tools. A colleague recently recommended a course called Claude for marketers.