Welcome to The Bossy Nurse Podcast, a show about nurse creators, innovators, risk-takers, and the ideas that shape their success.
In this episode, Marsha Battee speaks with Niki Pham, Founder and Writer of RN Forward, and how Niki’s critical care career, a chance introduction to the Bay Area healthtech community, and years of research led her to build RN Forward and its Nurse-Founded Company Database.
Key takeaways
- Nurses’ clinical expertise is a business asset, and Niki believes they should retain ownership and receive economic value when their ideas become products.
- RN Forward makes the nurse-founder ecosystem easier to navigate by bringing company, funding, accelerator, and founder information into one public resource.
- The best path to scale depends on the business category, with medical devices, care-delivery companies, and software products requiring different funding strategies.
- AI can speed up research and prototyping, but Niki keeps a human in the loop to verify sources, funding announcements, and company information.
- Building a scalable company requires a long-term commitment, a strong support system, and careful decisions about funding, equity, and control.
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Show notes / what you’ll hear
- Meet Niki Pham and hear how her path from Houston to nursing school and a CVICU new-graduate program shapes her clinical foundation.
- Follow her move from critical care into travel and per diem nursing, and learn how flexible scheduling creates room for her entrepreneurship research.
- Discover how living with a Y Combinator founder introduces Niki to startup life and helps her recognize the gap between healthtech ideas and bedside reality.
- Learn why Niki believes nurses should use their clinical expertise to build companies—and retain ownership when their ideas create economic value.
- Explore how the RN Forward Nurse-Founded Company Database helps nurses find founders, compare business models, research accelerators, and identify investors.
- Understand how Niki evaluates scalable companies and why a clear, system-level healthcare impact matters more than simply selling a product to nurses.
- Compare the funding paths for medical devices, care-delivery companies, software, and other healthcare business models.
- Consider what nurses should ask before committing years of their lives to a startup, including questions about family support, burnout, equity, and control.
- Go behind the scenes of Niki’s research and publishing workflow, including Claude, Framer, Notion, and Wispr Flow.
Resources mentioned
- RN Forward — Niki’s nurse-focused healthtech and entrepreneurship publication.
- RN Forward Nurse Company Database — Explore nurse-founded healthcare companies and their founders, business categories, funding stages, and operating status.
- What Gets Into the Nurse Founded Company Database—and What Doesn’t — Read the current criteria used to evaluate companies for the database.
- The Next Healthcare Unicorn Is a Nurse: Why RN Forward Founder Niki Pham Is Teaching Clinicians to Build for Scale — The American Nurses Association article mentioned during the conversation.
- From Innovation to Venture Capital for Nurses with Dr. Dan Weberg — Revisit this episode for a plain-language introduction to venture capital, funding rounds, accelerators, and startup terminology.
- How Sarah Michelle Boes Built a $1 Million Nurse Business in 7 Months — Hear how a nurse entrepreneur grew and later sold her education company.
- Y Combinator — The startup accelerator that helped introduce Niki to the founder ecosystem.
- HealthTech Hang — The healthtech networking community and event series Niki discusses attending in the Bay Area.
- Nurse Capital — A venture capital firm investing in nurse-led healthcare companies.
- Antler in the United States — An early-stage investor and founder program mentioned as an example in the database.
- Claude, Framer, Notion, and Wispr Flow — Tools Niki mentions in her research, website, database, and prompting workflow.
Where to find Niki online
- Visit RN Forward.
- Subscribe to the RN Forward newsletter.
- Explore the RN Forward Nurse Company Database.
- Connect with Niki Pham on LinkedIn.
Guest Bio: Niki Pham, BSN, RN, CCRN
Niki Pham, BSN, RN, CCRN, is the Founder and Writer of RN Forward, a nurse-focused healthtech and entrepreneurship publication based in San Francisco, CA. A critical care nurse with 8 years of clinical experience, she has spent the past 3+ years researching the economics of nurse entrepreneurship, culminating in the RN Forward Nurse-Founded Company Database. This is a free and growing publicly available dataset of nurse-founded healthcare companies. In between writing for RNF and trying out the newest matcha or boba shops, she participates in the Scrub Collective (a clinician-focused venture capital community) and consults for healthtech companies at the intersection of nursing, AI, and innovation.
Timestamps
- 00:00 — Meet Niki Pham and hear how she balances bedside nursing with research on nurse entrepreneurship.
- 09:36 — Niki explains how a Y Combinator founder and a Bay Area networking event introduced her to the healthtech ecosystem.
- 18:12 — The conversation turns to Niki’s research and the purpose of the RN Forward Nurse-Founded Company Database.
- 26:36 — Niki and Marsha discuss how companies are evaluated for scale and meaningful healthcare impact.
- 32:49 — Niki shares lessons for nurses who want to build scalable healthcare businesses.
- 39:50 — Niki explains how the database can support nurse founders, investors, policymakers, and health systems.
- 44:50 — Go behind the scenes of the database and hear how Niki combines AI tools with manual source verification.
- 50:41 — Niki answers the signature question: innovator, creator, or risk-taker?
