Pooria Shahin Podcast Transcript
Dr. Pooria Shahin joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
[00:00:46] Brian Thomas: Well, good afternoon, Pooria. Welcome to the show.
[00:00:49] Pooria Shahin: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:51] Brian Thomas: You bet. This is so awesome. And I appreciate you making the time. You’ve got an amazing background and we’ll get into that in a second. But again, hailing out of the great state of New York, I appreciate jumping on a podcast with you to talk a little bit about tech and a little bit about dentistry.
So Pooria, we’re going to jump right into the questions here. You’ve got quite the career in dentistry. As a software developer, entrepreneur, and now you’re the dentist and president of 1st Impression Dental. Could you share with our audience the one thing really that secret that drives and inspires you.
[00:01:21] Pooria Shahin: It’s difficult to pinpoint one motivation, one factor, but I guess one important driver is the desire to make a difference or make as much a difference as possible. I always wanted to know, okay, what’s the next best thing? What can I do better? And what can I do more? And that’s how I keep moving forward and decide the next step.
[00:01:42] Brian Thomas: Thank you very much. I appreciate the share on that. Again, we’ve got a lot of entrepreneurs in our audience that learn a lot, take some of the gems from these podcasts. So Pooria, you’ve got an unorthodox career. This is what really excites me. Being that you’re a licensed dental surgeon, you’re an entrepreneur and software developer.
Tell us how all this came to be.
[00:02:03] Pooria Shahin: We started A small version of Doctor’s Network. Doctor’s Network is a platform that enables patients who are underinsured or uninsured to get dental coverage or primary care coverage from their physicians or dentists. We started offering a plan in our dental office and because it was so popular, we decided to basically build a platform out of it.
Obviously, I was a dentist. I didn’t know anything about software development. So we hired a team of developers and pretty quickly, I realized that not knowing anything about software development is not really The way to go, because things wouldn’t get done right, or the communication wasn’t there between the sales team and the software development team.
So I finally realized I have to learn how to do both not to do it myself, but at the very least to communicate with both teams, what needs to be done and how to do it right. You don’t have to make the sausage, but it helps a lot to know how it’s done. So you ask for the right thing.
So I went back to school. I finished my degree, and I graduated a second time as a software developer. And after that, things just started rolling. They picked up.
[00:03:20] Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. And to take that level of effort going back to school and getting into that again, it’s really a new career, right?
That was just totally awesome. So, I appreciate the story on that. That’s some hard work and kudos to you Pooria, we are a technology platform publication podcast. We focus on emerging tech. so we’d like to ask our guests, are you leveraging any of that new and emerging technologies in your business or your tech stack?
And if not, maybe you found a cool tool app you might share with us. All
[00:03:50] Pooria Shahin: right. Of course. One of the things in the last decade that has revolutionized software development is the emergence of all different types of non-relational databases. So, these are databases that are much faster. Then the traditional databases, these databases made social media possible, right?
The reason that Instagram can find an image within a fraction of a 2nd out of billions and billions of images is the presence of these databases that 20 years ago weren’t available MongoDB, DynamoDB a few other ones are out there. I think MongoDB is one of the best known ones, but that’s how our website is able to find any page that you look for within 0. 3 seconds. I think that’s one of the exciting things that we’ve used. And yeah, I’m going to leave it at that.
[00:04:44] Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. And thank you. Yes, for the developers or people that want to know more behind the scenes around development websites and the speed of websites, especially around large databases.
That’s very helpful. So, thanks again, Pooria. I do appreciate that. And then Pooria, last question of the evening. Can you share something from your career experience that would be helpful for those listening that want to grow their career in either tech, dentistry, or entrepreneurship? Any one of those.
[00:05:13] Pooria Shahin: I think do what you know is the right thing to do whenever you’re in a dilemma, even if that’s not the easiest thing to do, or if that’s not expected of you to do, Ignore the noise and trust yourself is what I would suggest.
[00:05:27] Brian Thomas: Thank you again, another little gem we can extract from a conversation and share with our global audience. Pooria, it was a pleasure having you on today look forward to speaking with you real soon. Take care. Bye for now.
Pooria Shahin Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on Pooria’s podcast page.
