The short version
I'm Chris Baer. I studied neuroscience at Stanford, interned in a virology lab at Gilead Sciences, spent nearly two decades building products at eBay, Tripadvisor, and Wish, co-founded a neurology practice with my wife, and built a recruiting technology company. I live at the intersection of tech and medicine — and I founded Med to Tech because I've seen, firsthand, how badly both fields need each other.
How I ended up in tech
At Stanford, I studied neuroscience and was drawn to interdisciplinary research — editing the Stanford Undergraduate Research Journal and following every thread that intrigued me. That breadth is exactly what drew me to product and technology leadership.
Most physicians assume the only jobs in tech involve writing code. That's far from the truth — and once you see how many roles map directly to your existing strengths, the whole picture changes.
I started my tech career at eBay building products from the operations side, and what I discovered is that what I really love are the big architectural decisions of tech — using technology to solve meaningful problems at scale.
The career
Research virology intern. The life-science root.
Associate PM to Product Manager. Started the New College Grad hiring program (80 hires). Built registration and security products at internet scale.
Head of Product for FlipKey, a vacation rental marketplace acquired by Tripadvisor. Led Product, Design, Content, and Analytics teams.
Co-founded and ran operations for a neurology practice. Built the product, process, and technology infrastructure. This is where I experienced the intersection of medicine and tech firsthand.
Co-founded recruiting and talent-sourcing software — a private LinkedIn for the startup ecosystem. Directly relevant to career transitions.
Chief of Staff to the CTO (700+ person engineering org), then Senior Director on the executive team reporting to the CEO.
What I saw inside a medical practice
Co-founding a neurology practice gave me a perspective that few people in tech have: I experienced the healthcare system from the inside. I saw how much opportunity exists for technology to serve clinicians better — and how much clinicians understand about the real problems that need solving.
That experience made the connection between these two worlds deeply personal for me. It's one thing to read about healthcare technology. It's another to have lived on both sides.
The translation skill
My career has been built on translating between fields — bridging business and engineering, medicine and technology. That's exactly what you need for this transition: someone who speaks both languages and can help you reframe what you already know.
Why Med to Tech exists
Medicine and tech genuinely don't speak the same language. Clinicians making the move to tech usually ask other doctors for advice — but what you actually need is someone who understands both worlds. That's not a knowledge gap. It's a structural one. Someone needed to build the bridge.
Medical director is product manager. The reframing is the work — you're not starting over, you're translating. You don't need to code. You don't need AWS certifications. You need to understand how tech thinks, how it's organized, and how to tell your story in a language tech understands.
The moment we're in
The world is truly changing, possibly much bigger than the internet era. Microsoft has spent more than $30 billion on GPUs — more than the Apollo moon program. Mark Zuckerberg described the reaction gap between biologists and AI researchers: biologists think curing all disease is "wildly ambitious," while AI researchers ask "Why are you so unambitious?" That's the scale of thinking in tech right now.
This is a generational shift. Clinicians who understand tech won't just be well-positioned — they'll be shaping what comes next. Not because they learned to code, but because they learned to think alongside the people building the future.
You've already decided. Now it's about execution. Let's get you there.