Alex Cohen

CEO of Hello Patient and commentator on AI, SaaS, and the healthcare industry.

Claims

As speaker

Mentioned in

Key positions and views

A strong personal brand on Twitter is a critical asset for founders, providing unparalleled access to contacts, investors, and customers.

OpenAI's models are currently best-in-class, but the primary barrier to enterprise AI adoption is the operational unreliability and latency of AI agents, not a lack of intelligence.

He is highly critical of 'everything apps' like Notion and ClickUp, arguing they fail to excel in any single function and that users are better served by best-in-class, specialized tools.

Deeply integrated incumbent systems like Epic Systems have an extremely strong competitive moat that is nearly impossible to displace due to deep operational and hardware integrations.

A consumer platform, specifically Apple Health, will ultimately become the central repository for individuals' longitudinal health data, rather than an enterprise or provider-centric system.

Podcast consensus on Cohen

Points of consensus

▶Cohen consistently emphasizes the strategic importance of building a strong personal brand on social media (specifically Twitter) for tangible business benefits like networking, fundraising, and lead generation.

▶He views the current state of AI as powerful but limited, highlighting OpenAI's superiority while noting significant challenges like agent reliability and latency in competitor models for real-time applications.

▶He is a vocal critic of 'everything apps' and software that lacks a focused, best-in-class function, citing Notion and ClickUp as prime examples of products that are deficient in every function they perform.Apr 2026

▶Cohen believes deeply integrated, specialized enterprise systems like Epic's EHR have powerful, hard-to-disrupt competitive moats due to their complex integrations with hardware and hospital operations.Apr 2026

Points of debate

▶Cohen champions building a large online audience for business leverage but also states that a founder with one is either an 'incredible storyteller' or a 'terrible founder addicted to their online brand,' suggesting a fine line between effective marketing and a critical distraction.Apr 2026

▶He is building an AI-native company and is bullish on the technology's potential, yet he expresses significant reservations about the current reliability of AI agents and pushes the timeline for AGI out by five to seven years.

▶He advocates for using best-in-class, specialized software but reveals his company uses a consumer-focused bank (Citizens Bank) for business banking due to a specific founder-friendly perk (personal mortgage access), a pragmatic choice that deviates from a pure 'best tool for the job' philosophy.Apr 2026

▶Cohen's strategy for Hello Patient is to build an engagement layer on top of existing EHRs, while simultaneously predicting that a consumer-facing platform, Apple Health, will ultimately win the battle for centralized longitudinal health data, creating potential long-term strategic tension.Apr 2026

Key themes

▶Building an AI-Native Healthcare CompanyApr 2026

Cohen details the strategy, funding, and technical challenges of building Hello Patient. This includes raising a $22.5M Series A, defining a strategy to be an engagement layer over existing EHRs, and tackling the core problem of AI agent unreliability in complex, real-world workflows.

His experience highlights that the primary obstacle to AI adoption in business is not model intelligence but operational reliability and latency, suggesting a competitive advantage for companies that solve practical implementation challenges.

▶The Power of a Founder's Personal BrandApr 2026

Cohen repeatedly emphasizes the direct business value of his large Twitter presence. He claims it grants him access to nearly any contact he desires and has resulted in tangible benefits like receiving a year of free software from the CEO of ZoomInfo.

This demonstrates a modern go-to-market strategy where a founder's personal audience acts as a significant, low-cost channel for sales, networking, and investor relations, potentially de-risking early-stage ventures.

▶Critique of the SaaS EcosystemApr 2026

Cohen offers pointed critiques of various software products and business practices. He criticizes 'everything apps' like Notion and ClickUp for being masters of none, enterprise vendors like Workday for opaque sales processes, and companies like Carta for alleged misuse of customer data.

Cohen's perspective reflects a growing user fatigue with 'SaaS sprawl' and a demand for focused, high-performing tools, signaling a market preference for best-in-class point solutions over bloated, multi-function platforms.

▶Pragmatic View on AI and Future of TechApr 2026

Cohen provides specific assessments of the current AI landscape and makes predictions about the future of healthcare data. He believes OpenAI's models are superior, AGI is 5-7 years away, and that Apple Health will ultimately centralize consumer health data.

His pragmatic view on AI—acknowledging its power while being grounded in its current limitations like reliability and latency—suggests that the immediate winners in the AI race will be those who solve practical implementation challenges rather than just chasing raw model intelligence.

Source episodes

Sentiment over time

Not enough data for timeline

Changes over time

Seed Stage

Hello Patient secured its seed round from investors including 8VC, Bling Capital, and Max Ventures.

Ongoing Side Project

Cohen operates a side project, Spendoso, which analyzes SaaS usage within companies, informing his views on 'SaaS sprawl'.

Series A Funding

Hello Patient announced a $22.5 million Series A funding round led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from 8VC and new strategic investors like Alumni Ventures and Lord David Pryor.

Current Technical Challenge

Cohen identifies the primary challenge in building Hello Patient as the inherent unreliability of current AI agents in consistently following complex workflows.

Next 12 Months

The company's primary goal is to scale its platform to be live in thousands of healthcare clinics.

Post-Series A Expansion

Following its funding round, Hello Patient is actively hiring for roles in engineering, sales, and marketing, and is building a solutions engineering team in Mexico City.

Suggested prompts

How does Alex Cohen's strategy of leveraging a personal brand for B2B sales and fundraising compare to traditional enterprise go-to-market models? &nearr;What are the potential conflicts or synergies between Cohen's critique of 'everything apps' and Hello Patient's strategy to become a comprehensive 'engagement CRM layer' for healthcare? &nearr;Given Cohen's view on the unreliability of AI agents, what specific technological or methodological breakthroughs are necessary for Hello Patient to achieve its goal of scaling to thousands of clinics? &nearr;How does Cohen's prediction that Apple Health will centralize consumer data impact Hello Patient's long-term strategy as an engagement layer on top of professional EHRs? &nearr;

Key concepts

Hello Patient 2 ep Artificial Intelligence (AI) 2 ep SaaS (Software as a Service) 2 ep Fundraising 2 ep Healthcare Technology 2 ep Epic Systems 1 ep Personal Branding 1 ep AI Models (OpenAI, Gemini, Claude) 1 ep Software Critique (Notion, ClickUp, Carta) 1 ep

Notable quotes

“99% of the people that I want to get in touch with will respond to me now because of Twitter.”

Alex Cohen · Hello Patient CEO Alex Cohen - SaaS Sprawl and Meme Culture

“it's like agents are still not reliable... that's always the hardest thing is getting them to follow the things that you tell them to do”

Alex Cohen · Meme Lord CEO Raises $22.5M Series A for Hello Patient

“frankly apple health will win the battle here if we're talking about like who's gonna win long term of i want access to like one single point of longitudinal data like healthcare data”

Alex Cohen · Hello Patient CEO Alex Cohen - SaaS Sprawl and Meme Culture

“there's a reason why every hospital system in america uses epic there's a reason why every intensive specialty uses epic like the amount of ingrained deep integrations across hardware and devices and like just the hospital network and operations that they have you you just can't switch from them”

Alex Cohen · Hello Patient CEO Alex Cohen - SaaS Sprawl and Meme Culture

Report last updated: Apr 21, 2026

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