Oliver Eidel's Blog

About

I’m a medical doctor, software engineer and startup founder.

Here are a few random facts which might describe me well:

I’m a medical doctor by training. Some time in my studies I got the opportunity to write a lot of Matlab code for a few research projects, and I realized that writing code was way more fun for me and all the other fun I had experienced in med school so far.

Building things, i.e. writing code, is the activity I enjoy the most. It took me quite a while to realize this – I’ve been working for 8+ years in startups now, including my own, and I used to tell myself that all the “other stuff” would be enjoyable, too, e.g. being part of a fast-growing, investor-driven startup (it’s chaos), dealing with regulatory compliance (it’s hell) and accepting that an unprofitable startup is on the right track (it’s not). Nowadays, in the privileged position of owning a company which is profitable, so I have the liberty to choose what to work on. I choose to build things and write code.

My company is called OpenRegulatory and it offers a SaaS which helps medical device manufacturers achieve regulatory compliance. I founded it in 2020 after leaving my first (and possibly last) job. At that job, I noticed that the medical device regulatory compliance industry is, in simple terms, full of incompetent people with all sorts of wrong incentives. The good news is that this means there’s hardly any competition when it comes to consulting and SaaS offers. The bad news is that you’re now in the regulatory compliance industry which is full of incompetent people with all sorts of wrong incentives. Anyway, building OpenRegulatory gave me the opportunity to build a company in a way in which I wanted to build it: It’s boostrapped, profitable, 100% owned by me. It’s a small team (4 people right now), and I don’t plan to grow it because I’ve seen complexity grow (exponentially) when teams grow.

I was pretty enthusiastic about Clojure (a programming language), here’s a funny talk I gave at a conference. Later however, I switched to Ruby on Rails, which I use to build things nowadays. It’s an awesome combination of a high-level language with amazing libraries for web development. And web development is the most fun type of development for me – you can iterate fast, you can deploy immediately, people start using it. No long research cycles (machine learning), no fiddling with low-level languages and hardware (embedded programming), just crank out some code and observe how it provides value to people. Awesome.

I did my pilot’s license in Berlin and fly single-engine airplanes from time to time.

The best place to follow me is this website – check it for new posts from time to time. I’m semi-active on LinkedIn and X / Twitter where you can follow me, too. Here’s my GitHub. The best way to contact me is via LinkedIn.

Projects