The Hard Part Starts After the Demo | Scott Chetham (1/4)
October 12, 2026
Scott Chetham traces the influences that shaped his path into life sciences, from growing up on Australia's Gold Coast and watching his parents build careers through work and education to studying the intersection of engineering and medicine. He shares how a combined degree, early exposure to hospitals, and an unusual appetite for difficult problems pushed him toward biomedical research.
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“Two-thirds of our work is QA. It's not the development anymore. It's how do you ensure it's doing what you think it's doing and that it will keep doing it, it won't drift.”
“Two-thirds of our work is QA. It's not the development anymore. It's how do you ensure it's doing what you think it's doing and that it will keep doing it, it won't drift.”
Scott Chetham traces the influences that shaped his path into life sciences, from growing up on Australia's Gold Coast and watching his parents build careers through work and education to studying the intersection of engineering and medicine. He shares how a combined degree, early exposure to hospitals, and an unusual appetite for difficult problems pushed him toward biomedical research.
The conversation then moves into the rapid evolution of cardiac electrophysiology, including early catheter mapping, implantable devices, and clinical trial work at St. Andrews War Memorial Hospital. Scott and Jon also examine a problem that has become central to deploying AI in regulated fields: polished outputs can still be wrong, models can drift, and rigorous QA, source grounding, and human judgment are not optional.
Key Topics Covered:
- Growing up on Australia's Gold Coast
- Lessons from early work at SeaWorld
- The influence of Scott's parents and their path into higher education
- Biology, functional anatomy, computers, and the decision to pursue healthcare
- The value and limits of a highly regimented boarding-school education
- AI-generated misinformation in venture research and company diligence
- Why human interviews still matter in an AI-saturated research process
- Guardrails, source-of-truth data, and degradation across repeated AI generations
- Scott's combined engineering and medical training
- Early neural-network research for cardiac signal interpretation
- Cardiac electrophysiology, pacemakers, ICDs, and catheter ablation
- The transition from open-chest procedures to closed-chest 3D cardiac mapping
- Why AI deployment requires extensive QA, model monitoring, and human judgment
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Find our guest, Scott Chetham, at these links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-chetham-2949001
Website: https://farohealth.com/
Find our host, Jon Chee, at these links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonchee/
Learn more about Excedr:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/excedr/
Website: https://www.excedr.com
Intro & Outro Songs Created by OkKyojin:
https://flow.page/kyojin
Resources & Articles:
Stanford Medicine: https://med.stanford.edu/
Google Model Cards: https://modelcards.withgoogle.com/about
Medtronic: https://www.medtronic.com/
Companies, Universities, & People Mentioned:
SeaWorld: https://seaworld.com/
KPMG: https://kpmg.com/
Google: https://www.google.com/
Stanford University: https://www.stanford.edu/
Medtronic: https://www.medtronic.com/
Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
02:38 Growing Up on the Gold Coast
03:05 The SeaWorld Production Line
04:02 A Family Built Around Education
07:18 Biology, Computers, and Healthcare
08:24 Learning to Lead Outside the Classroom
10:51 When AI Gets the Story Wrong
14:49 Guardrails Against Model Drift
16:27 Bridging Engineering and Medicine
18:24 Neural Networks Before the Boom
19:11 Inside the Cardiac Cath Lab
19:48 From Clinical Work to Research
24:58 The Revolution in Cardiac Mapping
29:43 Why QA Is the Real AI Work
33:47 Outro
The Biotech Startups Podcast gives you a front-row seat to the business and science of building a biotech. Hosted by Jon Chee, CEO of Excedr, the show features honest conversations with founders, execs, and investors about their work, their companies, and how they got there. From scientific breakthroughs to startup lessons, each episode explores what it really takes to grow a life science company—from pre-seed to IPO.