# I'm not necessarily the cleverest person in the room - **Episode:** [213](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/213.md) (2025-07-10) - **Type:** interview - **Tags:** leadership, humility, self-awareness - **Time:** 2:41–7:20 (start 161s) - **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/213?t=161](https://truthliesandwork.com/213?t=161) --- [2:41] Al Elliott: I think you admitted to me when we chatted before that you are not necessarily the cleverest person in the room. So how do you manage all these geniuses? [2:50] Steve Roest: Sure. So I don't have a clinical background or a healthcare background, which is definitely true. PocDoc's initial area of focus was cardiovascular disease. So heart, the prevention of heart attack and strokes. My passion for that, I guess, comes from when I was 14 and my dad was basically the same age that I am. Now, almost to the day, he had a huge stroke due to undiagnosed cardiovascular disease. So I've always, it was catastrophic for him, as you'd expect, catastrophic for our family. All kinds of bad stuff happened as a result. And it meant that I had a really deep understanding of that disease area. So while I wasn't a healthcare professional, I really understood that use case from a very personal patient perspective, which was very helpful. And that really created the drive for the Healthy Heart Check. Our PocDoc's Healthy Heart Check is now the number one diagnostic test on the high street. It's available in Boots, Superdrug, Well, and it delivers in 9 minutes the equivalent of the NHS health check, just using one of our rapid test kits and the PocDoc app. But to answer your kind of original question, I'm not sure I've necessarily ever been the smartest guy in the room. I'm not sure I've ever been the dumbest guy in the room either. I think that what I've learned through my career of having done multiple ventures is you don't have to be the smartest person in the room to ask the right questions. And actually, when you're dealing with highly technical, complex, multifaceted problems that need to be solved highly collaboratively, it actually isn't beneficial to be the smartest person in the room because that doesn't actually necessarily create the right environment to solve those problems. In the best way. And so we've developed cutting-edge biochemistry, we've developed cutting-edge applied AI to transform a smartphone image of a rapid test into a fully quantified cardiovascular risk assessment. I'm an expert in neither of those places, but I am capable and confident enough to challenge the individuals in those groups and ask common sense questions. And challenge them to sort of establish why we should do one thing and why we should not do the other. What I've seen consistently with highly technical groups, highly technical individuals, is that there's often a default to perceived wisdom in those groups because of the incredible level of qualification and experience it takes to get to be proficient in those specialties. And often it's a bit of like wood for the trees. issue. So under no circumstances am I in my R&D group saying, well, you know, this is how you dilute samples and this is how you run experiments and this is what we do with the freeze dryer and things like that. Like, that's definitely not what's happening, but I can set questions and goals and challenge them and help them solve problems in a way that they might not necessarily be able to do themselves. So I'm a huge advocate for technical businesses to have senior people that aren't technical or don't have technical backgrounds as well, right? You can't run an R&D group without someone that's highly qualified in that scientific area or clinical area. I'm definitely not saying that, but having that blend at the top is really helpful. So I'm the non-technical co-founder, if you want to put it like that. And my 2 other co-founders are both scientists. So I come from a commercial business background. They come from a scientific background. I've become a lot more scientifically literate. They've become a lot more commercially literate. That's how I would explain that one [6:37] Leanne Elliott: So, right from the start, Steve's challenging this idea that you need to be the most qualified person to lead experts. What's important is how he frames it. He's not saying technical knowledge doesn't matter. He's saying the role of a leader is fundamentally different. And Steve's story goes deeper than just management philosophy. His motivation is deeply personal, and I think that's really important for understanding how he approaches leadership. Let's hear about why he chose a business route rather than becoming a scientist himself [7:06] Al Elliott: Can we just go back to the point, which I know is not a great point to go back to, but after your dad had his stroke, you obviously read up on it. You learned a lot about it. Why didn't you go down a technical route? Why didn't you become a clinician or a scientist?