Q&A with Brandon Yu: Healthcare Consulting, Startups & More 📊

Hey there, my name is Brandon (he/him), a current senior at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. I mention Scarborough Campus because I think there’s a stigma around peripheral campuses, particularly around the prestige of it all. I hope to be an example of how that simply isn’t true and how you can truly engineer your environment. At UTSC, I’m the captain of the Men’s Basketball team - I love basketball and I’ve been very fortunate to play at the junior varsity level after playing for over 10 years of my life. I’ve also founded 2 companies, iAscend (Toronto) and Nucleate Dojo (Boston) - both of which have been acquired and thriving since. I have done 2.5 years of research in computational psychology, cancer immunology, and synthetic immunology before the end of my 3rd year, at which I decided to do a drastic pivot from pursuing an MD/PhD to going into the tech and startup world. And now, I’m somewhat on that path, working at an innovation startup (onova) and as a VC analyst at the Winning Together Fund. And just for fun, I’m also doing some personal development coaching while I gather some thoughts for my next startup. I love building, learning, and just taking in the simple pleasures of life.

I joined the KPMG team last summer (in 2022) in their Digital Health group. This was a hybrid experience in Toronto, which made it a great opportunity to meet the team onsite in the newly renovated office space on Bay and Adelaide but also have the flexibility to work from home in Markham but also when I travelled to Vancouver. This was a 4-month stint with a pretty decent salary (especially compared to what they pay you in research and academia haha). As a healthcare consultant, you wear many hats - you don’t know what to expect and you get a pretty broad exposure to a lot of different projects. For me, I supported the rapid antigen testing distribution across Ontario, developed a go-to-market strategy for a telehealth company, wrote two thought leadership pieces on private-public partnerships and healthcare in the Metaverse, along with supporting in internal business development roles (eg. building a new service line from the ground up).

I came across this opportunity after I was hanging out with my friend in business who was casing for Boston Consulting Group (BCG). It just so happened that this particular case was a pharmaceutical case which led me to the realization that consultants could work in healthcare and pharma. I was an extremely late starter - I started applying with 2 weeks to the end of the deadline to both KPMG and Deloitte (the only two that were still taking applications).

Personally, it took a great ton of work for me to get there. I came in at a severe deficit - I had no formal business training outside my “founder” experience. I put that in apostrophes because I don’t consider myself one - at least not now knowing what I know and seeing the incredible founders I meet every day through my fund. I digress. I compensated by simply working my ass off - I coffee chatted as many people as I could, I would be doing cases 3-5 hours a day leading up to my interview. That helped me a ton in my 4-interview sequence that I had to go through to get 1 of 3 positions. For context, the other 2 people on my team was a practicing general surgeon of 5 years and an experienced hire with 7 years in the healthtech startup ecosystem. I was 20.

The most notable takeaway from this experience was that I was humbled immensely. I wrote about it in my newsletter but truthfully I started to question everything I knew about healthcare. We all say that we want to go into this field to make change but what does that actually mean? What are the mechanisms to do so and why isn’t change so easy to make? Having key exposure to leadership in hospitals, the government, and the boots-on-the-ground made me realize how complex this system is. It humbled me to even more appreciate the work that is being done on the frontlines but also made me really reflect on where to best direct my efforts if I really wanted to be someone that drove change in healthcare.

Somewhat. I landed my current role at Onova as an innovation consultant through my role at KPMG. I had a call with Onova’s CEO who then offered me to work with him directly at Onova (I had previously had a few email exchanges with the CEO when I was recruiting for KPMG). I’ve also had a few offers in healthcare investing, venture capital, and healthcare consulting following this.

Feel free to email me directly or reach out to me on Twitter or Linkedin.

I strongly believe in living a non-linear path. As an aspiring healthcare worker, having breadth in your experiences and interactions will make you a stronger care provider. Seek out opportunities that make you uncomfortable (eg. where you feel imposter syndrome) as that’s when you’ll learn the most. Stay the course, and be mindful always of why you’re doing this.

If this blog resonated with you, I have some more content on YouTube as well :)