Jean Nehme
Founder & CEO 
Touch Surgery, United Kingdom

Jean Nehme is a plastic surgeon, CEO and co-founder of Touch Surgery. Having completed his undergraduate medical training in London he embarked on a career in academia and surgery, where he experienced firsthand the limitations of healthcare. During his surgical training he undertook a part-time Masters in Surgical Technology at Imperial College London. His work awarded him a distinction, academic papers, awards and presentations at a multitude of international meetings. His research at Imperial included the application of virtual reality simulation to surgery and robotics. This was a natural marriage of his greatest passions, technology and healthcare, driven by a desire to build globally scalable solutions. Upon completing his degree and whilst a resident in plastic surgery, he began building with Andre Chow the technology that was to become Touch Surgery. In early 2013 they were awarded a position at a leading accelerator program in New York City to build out a vision for Touch Surgery. Since then Jean has raised funds from leading venture capital groups in the US and UK. In 18 months Touch Surgery has grown to over 40 people, with diverse expertise from world class animation to game and data technology. The Touch Surgery Lab is based in London and New York City. Jean has raised an undisclosed amount of funds to build out technology that has the potential to change surgery and ultimately improve patient outcomes globally.

Touch Surgery is a really innovative idea. How did you come up with it? What were the challenges you faced in turning it from an idea to a real startup, and how did you overcome them?

I am a surgeon and so is my co-founder Andre Chow, so we are somewhat experts in the problems of our field. Touch Surgery was born out of experiencing these problems firsthand. Surgery lacks standardization, objective evaluation, and tools that can disseminate best practices efficiently and globally. Working with a Andre, we set out to use our knowledge of technology to build a solution that would address these problems.

 What was the biggest mistake you’ve done as an entrepreneur? What did you learn from it?

Turning an idea into a functional startup was really hard especially when I had spent 8 years of my life training to be a plastic surgeon. I had no real business knowledge and a wanting to build technology with the aim of improving surgical practice and patient outcomes. As you can imagine there was skepticism and resistance from surgical mentors and family when I said: “I want to build technology that can improve global patient care.”

 What advice do you give to Lebanese entrepreneurs who are starting out today?

Overcoming your fears is the first step. We have a great photograph in the Lab that we took in New York which says, “Remember whatever you believe imprisons you.” We did not believe we could build a company, we did not believe we could ask the right questions, let alone find the answers. Early on we sometimes hired out of fear, not fully understanding what roles we would be filling, but making ourselves feel better because we had someone with an MBA in the Lab. This was a mistake.

My advice to entrepreneurs is to be fearless. You are imprisoned by what you believe in and you can achieve what you want once you overcome these fears. Believe in the problem you are trying to solve and then the solution. Be your greatest critic, ask lots and lots of questions. Don’t believe in your own hype, and in those that love you find both the support and the grounding. That helped me through a lot of the challenges, as did having a co-founder that I have been lucky to work with. We complement each other and fill in each other’s’ weaknesses. Finally, I recently heard a great saying: “Love going to work but also love going home.” I am still struggling with the going home part.