Business
Doctor swaps medicine for robotics
■ A Pennsylvania physician decides that manufacturing material-handling robots is the best business fit for him.
By Katherine Vogt — Posted April 3, 2006
Making sidelines pay
Doctors who branched out beyond running their practice tell why they did it, how they did it, and what you should know before you do it.
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Name: Scott Friedman, MD
Specialty: Family medicine
Location: Pittsburgh
Business: Seegrid Corp., which makes material-handling robots for moving pallets and boxes around warehouses and manufacturing facilities.
Annual revenue: The company is privately held and therefore does not disclose its earnings.
Why he started the business: "I had started a medical software company while I was in my medical training, and I grew that company then sold it to MedQuist. ... I thought I was getting into another software company with this, but it's a little different.
"The kind of robotics we're doing is really, really tough. ... It's a lot like medicine; You don't just get out of college and know how to do it."
Why he stopped practicing: "It ceased being fun. I had to look up all the medicines, because I wasn't doing it enough to keep up. I miss it a lot actually. My retirement dream is to go back to being a doctor."
Words of wisdom: "In medicine, you're always trained that the things you need to do are very hard. Very smart people who go into business confuse complexity with value. There are some very simple things that are valuable to customers. And that's something very smart people who go into business miss. ... Focus on finding something that customers want, and don't get hung up on whether it's hard to do or not."
