The idea came first. Then came years of early mornings and late nights before anything resembling success showed up. Omar Khokhar, MD, a practicing gastroenterologist, has spent a significant stretch of his career building ventures in sports, events, collectibles, and healthcare education while keeping a full-time clinical practice running in parallel. He is precise about what that actually required. "The biggest investment wasn't money," he says. "It was time and consistency."
That framing matters, because the story being told about physician side hustles often centers on inspiration: the frustrated doctor who had a brilliant idea and ran with it. Khokhar's version is quieter and more demanding. He traces his entrepreneurial drive to a recognition that waiting for the right conditions was itself a choice, and not a neutral one. Ideas were sitting idle. Opportunities to create value and build community were passing. At some point, he decided to stop treating the timing as someone else's problem to solve.
What followed, by his own account, was not a series of quick wins. "Success rarely came from one breakthrough," he says. "It came from hundreds of conversations, partnerships, lessons learned, and constant tweaks along the way." That accumulation, spread across different ventures and a long stretch of time, is the part that tends to get left out of the entrepreneur-physician narrative. The financial returns came eventually, but they were downstream of something else entirely.
"Entrepreneurship is less about having a great idea and more about execution, resilience, and relationships."
That sentence, almost plain in its construction, is where Khokhar's perspective gets interesting. He is candid about having underestimated the role of network, describing how mentors, partners, and supporters turned out to be as consequential as any single project or product. "People are willing to help," he notes, in a way that sounds less like a motivational aside and more like a correction to something he once believed about going it alone. The setbacks and failed projects he references are not dressed up as learning moments in the familiar startup-culture sense. They are just part of the record.
The broader context here is worth sitting with. Physicians are among the most educated professionals in the country, and a growing number are directing serious energy, capital, and creativity toward ventures that have nothing to do with patient care. What Khokhar's experience suggests is that the draw is less about escaping medicine than about what building something from scratch demands and rewards in ways clinical practice does not. Whether that is a warning sign for the healthcare system or simply a reflection of how talented people have always worked is a question his story raises without quite answering.
