Currently at TalkDoc

Rishi Sachdev

CEO & Technical Founder @ TalkDoc

I build healthcare technology that matters. TalkDoc is an AI-powered telehealth platform serving Medicaid behavioral health in California — with $1.8MM peak annual gross revenue, a staffing moat from a family operation that generated $100MM in gross revenue over seven years, and cutting-edge clinical AI. Previously at Google Fiber, Coinbase, and UC Berkeley.

Explore TalkDoc View Experience LinkedIn GitHub
rishi@talkdoc.com San Francisco Bay Area, CA 707.563.4862

Tech Stack

Languages & Technologies

Python
Django
Flask
React
PostgreSQL
AWS
Cloudflare
Git
Claude Code
OpenAI Codex
Product Mgmt
Ruby on Rails

The Opportunity

TalkDoc — AI-Powered Behavioral Telehealth

TalkDoc is a telehealth platform enabling Medicaid clients in California to access mental health care. We combine proprietary clinical AI, a vertically-integrated staffing moat, and deep domain expertise to deliver care at scale — with capital efficiency that stands out in healthcare.

$1.8MM
Peak Annual Gross Revenue
$600K
Peak Annual Revenue (Post-Paying Doctors, Clinical Leadership & PC)
$100MM
Total Gross Revenue — Affiliated Staffing Group (7 Years)
$20MM
Total Revenue Post-Paying Doctors — Affiliated Staffing Group (7 Years)
10+
Years Operating in CA Medicaid
🧠

Clinical AI

Local-first AI doctor note-taking powered by MedGemma. Real-time clinical insights surfaced during live calls. ML-based depression analysis producing PHQ-9 scores from audio recordings — enabling data-driven outcomes tracking at scale.

🏥

Vertically-Integrated Staffing Moat

TalkDoc leverages clinician recruitment infrastructure from Bay Area Doctors — a family-owned staffing agency that scaled from $0 to $100MM in gross revenue over seven years with only €500K in external financing, generating $20MM in revenue post-paying doctors over that period. This gives TalkDoc a structural advantage in sourcing psychiatrists and clinicians that competitors cannot easily replicate.

📈

Market Opportunity

Medicaid behavioral health is a massive, underserved market. California alone covers 14M+ Medicaid enrollees, with telehealth adoption accelerating post-COVID. TalkDoc is positioned at the intersection of value-based care, AI, and access — a multi-billion-dollar opportunity.

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Best-in-Class Outcomes

TalkDoc achieves a 0.16% annual hospitalization rate for mental health reasons across our population — 10–20x lower than the Medicaid average. These outcomes reflect the power of consistent, high-quality telehealth care paired with data-driven clinical oversight.

Interested in TalkDoc?

If you're exploring opportunities in behavioral telehealth or want to learn more about what we're building, I'd welcome the conversation.

Get in Touch Call Directly

Career

Work Experience

TalkDoc ● Current
CEO & Technical Founder
Bay Area, CA
Nov 2016 – Present
  • Built TalkDoc as a telehealth platform enabling Medicaid clients in CA to access mental health care, achieving $600K peak annual revenue post-paying doctors, clinical leadership & PC, and $1.8MM peak annual gross revenue.
  • Led development of a telehealth platform in Python and AWS to facilitate video calls between doctors and patients, check eligibility automatically, and handle note taking.
  • Developed a local-first AI for TalkDoc clinicians that provides automatic doctor note taking using MedGemma. Prototyped a way to surface clinical insights to providers using live call data powered by MedGemma.
  • Served as the product manager for a depression analysis system leveraging Machine Learning on audio recordings of patient/clinician calls to produce PHQ-9 scores that categorize patient depression.
  • Managed a team of 10 at peak operation level, including 3 software engineers, a product designer, and a product manager, following agile scrum with daily standups.
Google Fiber
Technical Program Manager
Mountain View, CA
Sep 2023 – June 2025
  • Worked as the first fulltime TPM on the company's confidential top priority project.
Coinbase
Senior Software Engineer
San Francisco, CA
Aug 2018 – Oct 2018
  • Recruited directly by Balaji Srinivasan (via an Earn.com message) to scale the platform's growth engine during the critical Earn.com → Coinbase integration.
  • Operated within the "Earn" vertical during its transition into Coinbase, focusing on scaling user adoption and engagement.
  • When the product roadmap shifted toward a direct internal merger, recognized the opportunity to apply these high-growth principles to a new sector — leaving to found TalkDoc.
Rooster
CTO & Technical Co-Founder
San Francisco, CA
Jun 2015 – Nov 2016
  • Partnered with the CEO to build, scale, and fund a hyperlocal social network.
  • Data-Driven Fundraising: Leveraged custom-built growth metrics to successfully raise our Seed round.
  • Precision Attribution: Engineered internal tools to link specific marketing efforts to long-term user retention, allowing for highly efficient capital deployment.
  • Experimentation Infrastructure: Built the foundation for rapid A/B testing and newsletter optimization.
Leftover
CTO & Technical Co-Founder
San Francisco, CA
Nov 2014 – Jun 2015
  • Attempted to pioneer the short-form audio space before the market fully matured.
  • Built a platform focused on discoverable, bite-sized audio content.
  • Transitioned the company off of Parse to a proprietary Python/Elasticsearch backend to support advanced content discovery and search.
  • Gained deep experience in the search for Product-Market Fit and the realities of early-stage fundraising.
Adstage
Software Engineer
San Francisco, CA
May 2014 – Nov 2014
  • Migrated database from PostgreSQL to Cassandra for an advertising network that fixed write performance issues, allowing for much faster data ingestion running on many servers simultaneously.
  • Fixed performance issues in Ruby on Rails codebase, significantly improving initial loading times.
EcoinClub
Technical Founder
San Francisco, CA
Sep 2013 – May 2014
  • Co-founded a strategic research and community group focused on the nascent "Altcoin" ecosystem, predicting the shift toward programmable blockchains years before mainstream adoption.
  • Market Foresight: Successfully identified and engaged with high-potential protocols at their genesis, including Dogecoin (2013) and Ethereum (2014).
  • Hosted meetups, facilitated early token distributions, and pitched experimental blockchain concepts to investors.
Bay Area Doctors / Csolutions Int.
Hands-Off Contributor
Bay Area, CA
Dec 2007 – Oct 2014
  • Served as a strategic partner for two family-owned California Government Healthcare Staffing clinician staffing agencies with outlier capital efficiency.
  • The Scale: The group scaled from $0 to $100MM in combined gross revenue over seven years with only €500K in external financing, generating $20MM in revenue post-paying doctors over that period.
  • Specialized in placing psychiatrists and clinicians within California government facilities with a lean team of just 6 people.
  • Currently leveraging this infrastructure to support TalkDoc's recruitment and professional corporation (PC) operations.
Thinkware International
Co-Founder
Napa, CA & Bangalore, India
Jan 2006 – Jun 2008
  • Built a global software distribution engine leveraging the Google AdSense ecosystem.
  • Revenue Scaling: Scaled daily revenue 23x (from $60 to ~$1,400/day) by optimizing marketing funnels and expanding our technical infrastructure.
  • Drove tens of thousands of installations worldwide for Google ecosystem products (Google Pack, Picasa).
  • Recruited and managed a team of software engineers to automate and scale the distribution platform.
  • Developed the business plan for "WiseAtoms," an EdTech concept connecting US students with tutors in India.

Side Projects

What I've Built

♟️
Chess Mentor (iOS)
Backend Software Engineer
2025
A Chess app that combines Stockfish, the world's best chess engine, with an LLM, to provide chess mentorship. Provides written feedback after every move. Launched on Apple TestFlight, with an App Store release coming soon.
🤖
PieBot Chess Engine
Software Engineer · Python
2025
A Python chess engine based on AlphaZero. Optimized the ML model so that $5 worth of training (12 hours) on an RTX 4080 led to International Master-level play — 600× cheaper than the original AlphaZero would cost to train on modern hardware.
🌐
SocialNetwork.Social
Software Engineer · Flask / React / Postgres
2025
An invite-only social network offering AI image generation, re-usable sound clips, and post categorization using LLMs. Includes Signal-like end-to-end encrypted real-time messaging.
⏱️
Time Tracker (Mac)
Software Engineer · Local LLM
2025
A Mac-based time tracker that allows a locally running LLM to nudge the user when it thinks they're being unproductive. Monitors the screen and processes screenshots using a local LLM.
🎬
Image to Video Search
Software Engineer · Python
Sep 2013 – Apr 2014
Image recognition system to quickly identify which video or GIF an image was taken from. Prototyped a Python image hashing system using PHash and LibPuzzle for video index searching by frame.

Background

Education & Awards

🐻
University of California, Berkeley
B.A. Computer Science & B.A. Applied Mathematics
2013

Leadership & Awards

🏆
Alumni, Fastest Learners Award — NFX
Nov 2015

Recent Relevant Coursework

ML Specialization — Coursera, by Andrew Ng
Entrepreneurship: Developing the Opportunity — Coursera

Investing

Angel Investing

💸
Angel Investor & Advisor
Dec 2014 – Present · Bay Area, CA
Investor in several pre-seed and seed-stage companies across technology, healthcare, and consumer sectors. I bring strategic value through product, distribution, and network effects expertise honed across 15+ years of company building.

Let's discuss TalkDoc

Open to conversations with those who share our vision for accessible, AI-driven behavioral health care.

rishi@talkdoc.com Connect on LinkedIn