Med Tech Talks Ep. 70: Leah Sarich

What do stories about Christopher Plummer, CityTV, and saving lives at scale share in common? 🤔 Easy: storyteller extraordinaire Leah Sarich.

This time around, Leah Sarich, Head of Story at Thin Air Labs joined Geoffrey Ching to chat about the role of stories in health VC. They chatted not only about Leah’s journey through journalism making news you can use, but also about how to make strong health tech pitches, what it takes to translate knowledge well, and why going to the “dark side” with communications in venture capital to save lives at scale might not be so bad after all.

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Timestamps:

01:39-03:13 - Christopher Plummer - Leah’s favorite story - but the fact that she favours the variety of stories she helped tell throughout her career.

04:05-04:42 - Summary of what Leah does, as explained to a five-year-old.

04:43-05:31 - Leah’s journey into journalism and broadcast journalism.

05:47-06:56 - How Leah found her way into health journalism.

07:01-08:04 - What has kept Leah in health reporting - teaching “news you can use”.

08:15-09:49 - What is unique about health journalism? Leah loves the knowledge translation - specifically the challenge and building trust.

09:50-11:00 - How to maintain trust in journalism despite the pace mandatory in the field. Leah states that getting it right and taking time to understand how to best convey the information accurately to a lay audience.

11:00-13:08 - How do you make stories most compelling and relatable? Leah asks for a patient from a study/with a certain disease so that she has the patient's perspective, but finds it a common problem that she has to rein in the jargon that experts speak in.

13:08-14:31 - Why it is helpful for a journalist to stay on the same beat for a long time - the body of knowledge for a beat is quite useful to do journalism efficiently and effectively.

14:31-16:08 - “I like to say that I specialize in relationship building” - the importance of building relationships in storytelling.

16:09-19:11 - Leah reveals the pivot that she took, like other journalists have done, to go into communications. The twist? Her pivot was into healthcare venture capital. Leah tells the story of how and why she joined Thin Air Labs.

19:12-20:47 - What does Leah do with Thin Air Labs? Leah shares the importance of storytelling with the companies and investors under the Thin Air Labs umbrella.

20:48-22:22 - What’s a story to a pitch? Leah shares some news you can use when it comes to making a pitch golden.

22:23-24:43 - Why emotion when data is so important? Leah reiterates the importance of emotion in remembering start-ups and their pitches.

24:48-26:46 - Leah details her feelings about “going over to the dark side” in communication, and the role of scalability in her decision process.

27:01-29:09 - Leah’s love of challenge makes it easy for her to absorb the new language of VC, despite the remarkable differences between VC and broadcast journalism jargon.

29:09-31:13 - Where are young journalists going? Is communications to more travelled path now with the fall from grace of broadcast journalism as a major industry?

31:27-33:00 - How can journalists make the leap into VC to help companies make scalable impact more efficiently and effectively?

33:00-34:15 - What is the difference between a communicator and a marketer? Leah explains that the two specialists target different outcomes, and how she classifies the work she does.