Episode
The Cost of Failure Has to Go to Zero (ft. Nish Khandwala)
- Podcast
- DGTL Voices with Ed Marx
- Published
- Jul 16, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1727
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Summary
Nish Khandwala is the Co-Founder and CEO of Bunkerhill Health, an AI agent platform for health systems backed by Sequoia and deployed at Cleveland Clinic, Stanford, UCSF, and more than 25 other institutions. A Stanford CS grad with a Master's in AI and a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Nish built Bunkerhill after a Nature-published research algorithm he helped build at Stanford sat unused on his laptop for two years, then found its real-world moment when his own father had a heart attack. In this episode of DGTL Voices, Nish talks with Ed about the calcium-scoring model that inspired the company, why healthcare has to stop imposing drug-development timelines on modern software, and the governance shift he thinks hospital CEOs need to make: drive the cost of failure toward zero, iterate fast, and stop treating AI like a five-year plan. Plus his origin story from India to Saudi Arabia to Stanford, the difficult-conversations lesson he's learned about leadership, and why he doesn't buy the false dichotomy between clinical and administrative AI. https://marxadvisory.com